The Ends of Worlds
by Xanrivash
Summary: Demyx wasn't trying to save any worlds today, just one person. But first he needed someone to save him, and then the blue box appeared...
1. Meanwhile

"...I want off this world now."

"So do I. I have to be honest with you."

Demyx sighed and looked up as much as he dared, shielding his eyes against the giant orange-red sun that hung low in the burning sky. He felt like he was on a deathbed watch in a graveyard, except the world he and Axel were in was both burial ground and moribund. They'd been sent to lay the groundwork for retrieving the world's heart before the helium flash - whatever that was; Demyx didn't understand the concept any too clearly beyond the fact that the entire system would be deep-fried in an instant - but quite honestly, he would have been more than happy to fuck off and let the world die naturally. "I don't even like to _think_ about what happens to worlds when they die, let alone have to watch the process," he complained aloud, kicking a rock to emphasize his point. "I mean...is there even any intelligent life on this planet anymore? If there isn't, we could call Roxas in right now and have done."

"Last reports said there were," Axel said, digging the mission papers out of his pocket and having to shield his eyes just from the glare of sunlight on paper. "I think the last reports from this world were...not within any of our lifetimes, but...society here has kind of been going technologically backwards as the population shrank. When the sun started to expand, they had high enough technology to bail from their homeworld and move further out in the solar system, set up nice, protected domed cities for themselves, and...now they're using spears and hand axes as their weapons of choice. They may have forgotten how to work metal at all by now."

"They may all be extinct by now," Demyx groused, as Axel slid his hood back for a moment to scratch his head. "Put your hood back up, you moron. You've probably already sunburned."

"Shut up," Axel said petulantly, putting his hood back up. "I put sunscreen on before we left."

"Axel, _look_ at the _size_ of this _sun_. I don't know if they manufacture sunscreen anywhere in the _worlds_ to cope with that kind of solar radiation. Besides, you flash-fry under a normal sun."

"I do not!"

"Axel, you do. There's so much photographic evidence I wouldn't bother to deny it. Besides, Mr. Pure-Irish-And-Proud-Of-It, the Irish aren't known for their wonderful sun tolerance."

"All right, all right, shut up. I got my hood back on."

"Good," Demyx grunted, his gaze turning to the ground. They were walking along what used to be the bed of a wide and mighty river, but now it was down to a narrow creek he could hop over on one foot without much trouble. Clusters of weedy plants grew thick around the banks, a few of them sporting dingy cream-colored flowers, but there was no living plant life that Demyx could see further than a foot from the water. When the river dried up completely, even these weeds would no doubt shrivel and die, and the scalding sun was doing its best to evaporate away every drop of water on this world. Including him, which was as uncomfortable a thought as it was a feeling. How long did the world have before there was no liquid water left anywhere - in other words, how long was any life on this world going to exist? Even if the helium flash was delayed another hundred million years, if all the water on this world evaporated away in another thousand - well, then, there would only be life on this planet for another thousand. It might not even be that long; where did this little creek lead? To a protected underground reservoir, or to a lake or ocean that was no doubt vaporizing like a shallow puddle? How much of this weedy, scraggly plant life was edible to the resident fauna? Was there any resident fauna left at all? "I fucking _hate_ this mission!" he suddenly burst out, stomping the ground for lack of anything suitable to kick; even three feet away from the creek, the ground was baked so hard that all he accomplished was hurting his foot. "I don't fucking _care_ how much help grabbing the heart of an entire world would be; I don't want to have to fucking stand around and watch it die around me!"

"...Demyx..."

"_What?!_"

"Demyx, would you chill the fuck out before you have an aneurysm?"

Demyx stopped dead and stared blankly at Axel, sparing a moment to consider how strange it was that _Axel_ was telling _him_ to chill out. Come to think of it, Axel couldn't be having too much fun either; maybe he could handle the heat better, but his eyes were just as light-sensitive as Demyx's, and at least Demyx _could_ tan instead of simply burning to a blistery crisp, and Axel was probably thirsty to boot. "Sorry," he grunted, suddenly feeling like a complete idiot for that little meltdown. "I just -"

"I know," Axel said, before Demyx could find a way to finish the sentence. "You are sensitive and artistic and don't like being in the presence of death. And you're probably baking in full uniform, too, especially with that backpack."

"...Yeah," Demyx said, surprised to hear himself admitting his own discomfort. "Can't even sit down on a rock without burning my ass to the point where I couldn't sit down again for a month. Even through three layers of clothing." He sighed and lowered himself to the ground, sitting carefully on his heels to avoid contact with the scorching soil, and pondered the flowers closely for a few moments. Before long, the heat radiating from the ground became unbearable, and the air seemed too scalding to breathe; moments before he had to either stand up or pass out, he reached out and picked a single flower before levering himself back to his feet. These plants were apparently meant to have multiple flowers on a stalk, but this stalk only had a single blossom at the very end, a smallish three-petaled thing with a faintly sweet scent, and seed pods left behind where its other, older blossoms had no doubt been. "Probably the last beautiful things in this world," he murmured as he tucked it into his pocket.

Even with hearing aids, Demyx's hearing was hardly spectacular; the only way he was able to hold a spoken conversation without being able to see Axel's face was the fact that Axel was well aware of his handicap and (generally) kept his voice raised enough for Demyx to hear clearly. Lost in his own thoughts and not paying attention, he didn't even realize Axel had moved off until he heard him calling sharply. "Get with me already!" Axel commanded, while Demyx stumbled and nearly fell over. "Our best chance of finding any -" Demyx lost the rest of what he was saying in his effort to catch up, but at least Axel stopped yelling at him until he got close enough to hear his raised-normal voice clearly enough. "Kind of you to join me!"

"Sorry..." Demyx said, slowing up to walk next to Axel again. "You know I'm a sensitive, artistic type, prone to standing still and daydreaming at any moment."

"You're hilarious," Axel grunted, pointedly turning his back on Demyx and making conversation that much more difficult. "One of these days, you..." He wandered off muttering too softly for Demyx to make out what he was saying, and Demyx didn't care to find out deeply enough to catch up with him. He just trailed along behind, letting Axel get as far ahead of him as he chose, or simply however far ahead he got before he caught on that Demyx was lagging again. Demyx figured, as Axel wandered out of sight behind a broken rock, that that wouldn't be until Axel either got thirstier than he was proud or decided it was time to stop and camp for the night.

"Demyx!"

...That wasn't an angry shout. That was a panicked scream. Cursing his inattentiveness and his poor hearing, Demyx ran ahead past the rock, to find Axel surrounded and already bound by several figures in dark gray-brown robes, his hood down and his face a mask of fear; one of the robes was on fire, but its wearer didn't seem any too fazed. Axel was struggling for all he was worth, to no avail, but for some reason, his captors seemed to be going out of their way to keep him restrained without hurting him, or giving him a chance to hurt himself. Which was no doubt a good thing, Demyx decided as he ran at them, ready to summon his sitar; even if the locals were trying to capture them, the fact that they were apparently trying hard not to hurt them must -

No. It was only Axel they didn't want to hurt. And Demyx had just had his stomach ripped open by a metal-tipped spear to prove it, so quickly that he hadn't even seen the spear or the warrior that held it until it was already too late. There was just blood - blood on his robe, blood on the blade, and then blood everywhere.

He could hear Axel crying his name again, as he fell to his knees - he could hear the fear in his voice first, and then the rage - but every sound seemed to come from a thousand miles away. He could see Axel finally work one arm free, and slash the throat of one attacker with a chakram, before the others wrested the chakram from his grip and tied his arm down again without ever so much as pointing a weapon in his direction, all babbling in a language he couldn't understand - but everything looked so dim now, and so distant and unreal. He knew what was happening to him, and what would happen very soon, and he did not want to die, not here, not now, and not like this - but the warrior who'd injured him in the first place could see he was still alive and breathing, and was raising his spear once more for the final blow...and Demyx groaned faintly and toppled onto his side, closing his eyes and willing himself not to breathe. He could hear Axel screaming for him again, pain and grief mixing with the fear and rage now, but he might have been a million miles away...

_No. Not now. Not like this. Not while they still have Axel._

He couldn't see or hear where Axel and his captors were - even when he opened his eyes, his hood was blocking his view - but he could sense them, if he focused hard enough, by tracking the blood in their bodies, and he knew they were moving off. Thank the Gods his attacker had decided his "death" was good enough and he didn't need to be killed again just to make sure. Now, pressing his hands against the wound to curb the bleeding, he carefully stood up, and realized almost instantly that there was no way he could do this alone. The injury was too deep; he'd lost too much blood, and now he could barely stand...but he couldn't just leave Axel there, nor did he know whether or not he dared go back home to call for a rescue mission. It was the most obvious thing to do, with Axel kidnapped and him too badly wounded to help, but when this world could die at any moment...

_Please. Someone. Anyone. Any God that can hear me in this world. If You intend for me to die here, please make it quick; I don't care if I die alone, but I don't want to linger here just to suffer alone, especially in this hellhole. If You don't intend for me to die here, then please...help me..._

No Gods came down to save him, but he didn't drop dead on the spot. Apparently he was on his own again. At one and the same time, he appreciated the level of faith the Gods had in him, and really wished they had less.

Groaning softly, Demyx looked up at the horizon line, in the direction where Axel and his captors were heading. He couldn't see them, but over to the side, in the middle distance, something caught his eye - an artificial construct that looked decidedly out of place in this bleak, stony environment. A blocky, rectangular construct, to be specific. A box. A box that, in yellower light, would probably look blue.

_...I get it now. When the Gods can't come themselves, They send the Doctor._

He couldn't tell, right then, if the TARDIS was 500 feet or five miles away, or fifty, but he knew that he couldn't drag his wounded body that far. He would, sooner or later, go back down, and if he went down a second time in the middle of this desert, he would never get up again. And he couldn't rely on the Doctor emerging and finding him, one black speck in the brown, before he faded, especially with night closing in. Could he...he couldn't see clearly enough to visualize the area in front of the TARDIS, not well enough to cast a portal, but...what had the Doctor said? The reason the TARDIS was bigger on the inside was...something about the inside being in a separate dimension...normally portaling into a vehicle was nearly impossible, but if the inside of the TARDIS was a whole separate dimension... With his only other choice being to lie down and die, he tried to picture the interior of the TARDIS as clearly as possible, cast a portal, dragged himself through it, and collapsed as soon as he saw light again.

Fortunately, the Doctor was right at eye level, staring at him as though he'd never seen anything remotely like him before. Blank shock soon turned to something like stark horror, which Demyx assumed - or hoped - was due to his physical condition. "How the hell did you _do_ that?" the Doctor demanded, pointing somewhere behind Demyx. "What _are_ you?"

...Well, shit, it was the _portal_ that had his attention, not the _massive gaping wound and associated blood loss_. Were the Gods just toying with him or what? "Doctor...i-if I'm s-still alive in...five minutes...I'll tell you," Demyx choked, trying not to spit up too much of his own blood in the process, and closing the portal to remove the distraction. "But I-I gotta...live that long...first."

The Doctor didn't seem to hear him; he just stood up and walked over to where he was lying, stark horror and _anger_ in his eyes. Paying no attention to the wound, he grabbed Demyx's throat, undoubtedly to check his pulse, and then jerked away as if he'd been stung, backing into another corner of the room. "I thought your kind were dead," he hissed.

..._Okay. I get it now. Not only do the Gods want me dead, They _really_ want to hammer home the fact that I'm an unwanted, unloved little piece of nothing first. Two minutes ago, I thought the Doctor was totally awesome and cool and the least likely person in the worlds to be put off by not having a pulse and my only hope of living another five minutes, and...fuck this life. I've had it. I'm done._

By all rights, standing up should have been impossible right then, but Demyx was just determined and just angry enough to do it. If he was going to die anyway, and wouldn't be allowed to die near a friendly presence, he'd rather die alone than in the company of someone who'd been a friend right up until they saw a portal and checked his pulse. "S-sorry for...i-inter-rupting..." he choked, blood dripping from his mouth onto the floor as he took one step towards the door, collapsed again, and started to crawl. "If...if it's...a-any...c-c-consol-lation...th-there's...g-gonna be...one less...of -"

_Click_.

"_No!_"

...Well. Okay. No, what? Did the Doctor just lock the TARDIS door on him? What the fuck was he doing, if he couldn't stomach the thought of one of _his kind_ being alive but didn't seem keen on letting him die? Demyx was too weak to roll over now, or even raise his head, but his question was soon answered when the Doctor rolled him over and started spraying something on the wound. Demyx had no idea what it was, but all of a sudden, he wasn't still bleeding. He still felt like he was running about six pints low, but not bleeding anymore was a good place to start. "W-what are you...doing?" he asked, his vague, wandering attention mostly on the not-bleeding wound.

Somehow, he managed to make himself look at the Doctor's face, and couldn't read what he saw there. Horror? Contempt? Fear? Anger? Disgust? At himself or at Demyx? What was he looking at - _what_ Demyx was, or _who_ Demyx was? "I'm sorry," the Doctor said, backing off a step and shaking his head slightly. "But - how could you -"

"'Splain later," Demyx mumbled, just before he became unaware of everything.

* * *

If Demyx had been less used to waking up in pain in places he'd never seen before, he might have freaked out. As it was, he just relaxed and pondered the unusual ceiling until he had a chance to work things out in his head. As he recalled, he should be dead, and wasn't. Again. If he failed to die too many more times, he'd have to start questioning his own mortality. All right, what had happened this time...he remembered that scorched, dying world, the one they'd been checking out before calling Roxas in to drown it in Heartless...and then Axel was suddenly dragged off by the locals who almost killed him...and when he prayed for help, he saw the TARDIS...and then...

And then what?

And then he remembered all too well what.

He tried to sit up, but the pain stopped him quickly, leaving him to wonder helplessly - where was he now? Not back outside; whatever his issue with Nobodies, at least the Doctor wasn't cruel enough to throw him back out after healing him. But that didn't answer his question - where was he? Still on board the TARDIS? It looked like some kind of hospital environment, all nice and white and sterile and futuristic; he was lying on a bed, with a sheet up to his shoulders, and his torn, bloody clothes had been left on a chair as if he'd want them back. Where was the Doctor? Was he around? Was Demyx still on the TARDIS, or had he been taken to a hospital and abandoned? If so, great, he might live, but then he'd have to go home and call a rescue mission to save Axel, and if the world was dying so swiftly...or if the Doctor had taken him outside of his linear timeline and wasn't sticking around to bring him back...then he'd never go home...

"Demyx."

Well, the Doctor was still around. That was good. Demyx did his best to sit up a little, and wound up partly propped up on his elbows and partly on a pillow. The Doctor was just standing there, watching him with a dark expression; Demyx still couldn't entirely interpret the look on his face, but for some reason, that just made him angry. He had no idea why the Doctor might have problems with Nobodies, whether he had a real, justifiable reason or whether it was just your normal, everyday prejudice, but Gods damn it all, it wasn't like he'd _asked_ to be this way, and Gods alone knew what was happening to Axel while the Doctor was too freaked out by his lack of a pulse to even ask what had ripped his stomach open, let alone offer to help. "...Well...I guess I...made it another...five minutes," he murmured, so drained he had to stop for breath every few words. "Which is...kinda surprisin'...since I said I'd...explain...what I am, and...you already...seem to know that." The Doctor turned his gaze to the floor, and Demyx rather hoped he was feeling ashamed of himself. "And since...you don't seem to...to _like_ what I am...woulda been...awful damn easy to...to just -"

"No." The Doctor was looking up at him again now, and he looked - well, angrier than before, hopefully more at the suggestion that Demyx hadn't had a chance to make than at the fact that he existed without a heart. "I watched you die on the floor a dozen times already. As soon as you stood up, I could see it. There was no way I was going to stand back and let that happen to anyone."

...Okay, that surely made sense to the Doctor, but not so much to Demyx. He could probably make it make a degree of sense if he tried, but he didn't have enough energy to try right then. Besides, he was still angry. "Well, that's...very nice of you," he said, trying not to cringe visibly with pain. "Es-specially to...extend the courtesy to...one of _my kind_."

All right, he scored on that one. The Doctor stared blankly at him for a second, then dropped his gaze to the floor, looking more ashamed than angry. "I'm sorry," he said, which made Demyx feel...well, a little better, but not much, considering. "It's just - I didn't realize any of you had survived the Time War. You shouldn't have. And when I saw the rift, I...reacted without thinking." His eyes suddenly hardened, for reasons that, again, must have made sense to him but didn't make anything approaching sense to Demyx. "Especially on that world."

"...Right. Thank you, Doctor. A few more cryptic statements...that make no sense to me...just what I needed."

The Doctor just gave him an uncomprehending stare, as if Demyx was the one talking nonsense all of a sudden, and then gave him the most intensely penetrating look he'd been subjected to in a long time, as if trying to see right through his brain and into his past. Demyx half-expected him to give him a once-over with his sonic screwdriver/timey-wimey detector/whatever it was actually called, just to be thorough. "It doesn't make any _sense_," he said finally, as if whatever wasn't making sense was something Demyx was doing on purpose just to confuse him. "You're too young - _centuries_ too young. How could you come so far in time - how could you escape at all, es-" He broke off suddenly, and shook his head. "How could any Meanwhiles even exist outside the Time War?"

All right, officially, what the ever-loving hell. Did the Doctor just use 'meanwhile' as a noun? Because while Demyx wasn't sure what part of speech it actually was, he was pretty sure it wasn't a noun. "Doctor...you're just...confusing me even more."

The Doctor just stared at him with an uncomprehending look. All right, they weren't on two separate pages, they were reading two different books, it seemed. He looked like he was about to try and explain more to Demyx, but words were apparently failing him. "Demyx, do you...know what I mean by a Meanwhile?" he finally asked.

"...I...have to assume it's what...what you call people...who don't have hearts." Really, in context, that was the only answer that made any sense at all.

The Doctor gave him a long, measuring look, then nodded. "There were legends about them...probably through the whole of Gallifrey's history," he said, his voice softer than before but still loud enough for Demyx to hear clearly. "But no one truly believed they were real until near the end of the Time War. The entire concept sounded fantastic - for someone's timeline to become so distorted and convoluted that they were alive and dead not only at the same _objective_ time, but at the same _subjective_ time...but it happened during the Time War. It happened over and over. So many of our greatest warriors...the Sergeant, the Gambler, the Mariner, the Curator...when the timelines got bent one second too far...they would suddenly regenerate, and when they finished regenerating, their hearts were gone. They were still walking around, eating and breathing and everything, but without their hearts...not dead, but not alive either, or more accurately, they were both at once. They were already dead, yes, but meanwhile, they were still alive; they were still alive, but meanwhile, they were already dead. You could see it in their eyes. There was a - a hollow emptiness to them. They were powerful, yes, immensely powerful, and nigh-on impossible to kill or even force to regenerate, but...they were also broken, terribly broken...and they knew too well just how broken they were. It seemed - all they wanted was to either truly live again, or truly die, but they couldn't do either." He'd been looking at the floor throughout most of this explanation, but he suddenly looked sharply up at Demyx. "It's said that they craved the ends of worlds, searching for _something_ about their destruction that could give their hearts back and bring them back to real life."

...Well. No wonder the nature of the world had anything to do with it. Not least because...well, yeah, they had been there to make sure the world was as depopulated as was feasible before calling Heartless in to wipe the whole deal out, which they were doing because the heart of an entire world would make all kinds of progress on Kingdom Hearts, which they were constructing because...well, yeah. Hell, other than the method of creation, everything the Doctor said was lining up, and for all he knew, the Doctor was just wrong about how Meanwhiles were formed and didn't realize there were Heartless involved...it made too much sense, much too much sense. Doubly so if the portal (or rift, as he though the Doctor had called it) was what had first clued him in, because that meant that the Meanwhiles the Doctor was familiar with could do the same thing. Well - really, Heartless had existed as long as the worlds, and Nobodies had to have existed as long as Heartless, so it only made sense that the Organization he knew couldn't possibly be the first collection of Greater Nobodies in all of history...and if these Meanwhiles had been interested in dying worlds possibly being able to restore their hearts, had they been working on their own version of Kingdom Hearts? Demyx's head hurt just to contemplate it, and he was in enough pain already. Watching the Doctor pacing the floor did not help. "Doctor, where - where are we going?" he suddenly had to ask, as much to get off that damn subject as to satisfy his curiosity. Hell, for all he knew, they might still be parked on that world. He couldn't really tell if the TARDIS was in motion or not.

"I'm taking you to a hospital," the Doctor said, not really looking at him, though at least he stopped pacing. "I'm...not a real medical doctor, I just have an honorary doctorate, and...well. You need more done for that wound than I can do myself."

In Demyx's experience, contrary to what many honest men told themselves, honest men weren't the best judges of whether or not a person was lying, liars were. Demyx was a hell of a liar, and he was pretty sure that despite the lack of eye contact, the Doctor was being honest with him. And since the Doctor had been in the room with him since he woke up (so far as he knew) and hadn't had a chance to mess with the TARDIS controls, that meant that had to have been his destination all along. That was a very comforting thing to know. But that also left an even bigger problem - "We gotta go back, though," he said, trying to sit up a little further. "My friend is...still there. The...locals captured him...I dunno why they wanted him so bad, but...we gotta get him outta there..."

The Doctor just stared at him, his expression constantly shifting and hard to interpret. Was that fear? Horror that someone had been left behind on that dying world? Anger (or at least frustration) that Demyx hadn't mentioned this earlier? Resignation that they'd now have to turn around and go back? Concern that he'd have to turn around quickly while he still had a badly wounded passenger? A flicker of...amusement? "You know, Demyx," he finally said, visibly trying not to smile, "this _is_ a time machine."

...Oh. Right. That just made...things ever so much easier. They could...potentially already be back there, rescuing Axel, and yet he could still have enough time to recover first. They might have been right over the next rise or behind the next rock, waiting to chase off Axel's attackers and whisk him off to safety, and the thought of it was enough to make Demyx smile a little. "Awesome...time machine. I'll keep that in mind...all right. Allons-y, Doctor."

"Allons-y." The Doctor actually smiled at that, and half-turned towards the door before turning right back around. "...Wait, what's your friend's name?"

"Axel..."

"A-X-E-L, right? All right, I'll remember that..." With that, the Doctor disappeared, and Demyx managed not to laugh until he was all the way gone. Even then, it hurt to laugh very much, but it was just too funny not to.

* * *

AN: The Doctor is involved; therefore, shit is going to get weird. How weird? We'll see.


	2. The Rage Vaccine 1

Demyx wasn't sure how long he'd been unconscious, if he had been. All things considered, it seemed awfully likely. But that was only a minor detail; what counted for more was that he was still alive, still in pain, and still aboard the TARDIS. And, he was reasonably sure, he could distantly hear that grinding noise that meant the TARDIS was either taking off or landing. Since the Doctor had promised a hospital, and he didn't remember a hospital yet, it damn well better have been landing. Though if the Doctor had decided to screw him over, and was just going off wherever he pleased...well, there wasn't a blessed, damned, or morally neutral thing Demyx could do about it except portal home, get Vexen's help, and try to put together a real rescue mission, but...Gods above, it was bad enough that Axel was trapped on that dying world without even more of the Organization being in danger, and if a rescue mission had to be carried out in real time, it might already be too late. Besides, the Doctor's previous outburst notwithstanding, Demyx just couldn't make himself believe that he even _might_ betray him...even if he was a Nobody or a Meanwhile or whatever the Doctor chose to think of him as...right?...

There was a bump, which Demyx had sort of been expecting and sort of braced himself for. A minute later, the Doctor came back in, looking cheerful-with-a-strong-undertone-of-worried. "Welcome to the year 5,000,000,070, New Earth, New New York; the view will be much more impressive once we get outside," he announced, as though this was a regularly scheduled airline flight newly arrived at its destination. "At least, that should be where and when we are. And, if I got the coordinates right, we should be right outside the finest hospital on the planet. Now that it's been cleaned up and all and..." He trailed off, while Demyx was still nodding intently and pretending to make sense of anything he said, and seemed to reconsider his explanation. "I'll tell you all about that while you recover. I'll go get you...something that's not torn up and bloody."

"'Preciate it," Demyx grunted as the Doctor disappeared again, gingerly peering under the sheets to see the extent of the damage. Blessed Gods, that was...he didn't want to think how bad; he'd rather just be grateful for the fact that the Doctor had just happened to be right there right then, and was getting something to cover up the fact that he was wearing nothing except a bloody pair of uniform pants. All right, could he stand on his own? Demyx tended to pride himself on being able to function in spite of injury, but even sitting up made him incredibly dizzy. Shoes - he'd probably need his boots back, at least, but trying to get off the bed seemed to hold a serious risk of ending up on the floor, and the last thing he needed was more damage. Fortunately, it seemed, the Doctor had kept that in mind - he was coming back with a pair of drawstring pants, an oversized hoodie, and a pair of flip-flops. "Oh, good...somethin' easy to put on," he mumbled as the Doctor left again to let him change.

It took him longer than Demyx expected to come back, and when he did, he didn't look any too pleased. "I could have sworn I had a wheelchair in here somewhere, but I can't seem to find it," he said, before Demyx had a chance to ask. "I'm sure I'll stumble over it while I'm looking for a hydraulic spanner or something, but I can't waste more time on that right now. Come on; up you get. We'll do the best we can here..." With that, the Doctor sat down next to him, slinging Demyx's arm over his shoulder, and hoisted him off the bed. Demyx came that close to passing out from the strain, and was rather proud of himself that he didn't. "How are you feeling?"

"...'Ugh' seems to cover it," Demyx mumbled, leaning heavily on the Doctor's shoulder because he would most likely fall over if he didn't. "I just need...somebody...to lean on...oh, Gods, my poor singing voice...I swear...not usually that bad..."

"...You know, Demyx, maybe it'd be better if you just didn't talk right now."

"A'kay. If you say so." Demyx fell silent after that, focusing his dwindling energy on staying upright while the Doctor hauled him out of the TARDIS. It seemed to take ages - even assuming the medical wing or whatever was in the back, the TARDIS must have been even bigger than he'd thought - and he was feeling awfully close to dead by the time they finally got to the main control room, and the Doctor opened the door to reveal - "Ooh, shiny," Demyx couldn't help but say, forgetting that he wasn't supposed to talk. "So...tha' mus' be New New York. Prettier'n th'old one."

The Doctor said nothing, for a very long time, while Demyx wondered which of the many buildings around them was the hospital and why the Doctor wasn't doing anything. "No...this isn't New New York," he finally said. "I don't know where we are, and I don't know where the nearest hospital is."

"...What?...Fun. Jus' my luck," Demyx mumbled, trying not to simply fall over and take the Doctor with him. "What now?"

"Look for a building with a green crescent. That's how they mark hospitals in this day and age - do you see any buildings with green crescents?" The Doctor was already looking around, his calm facade already giving way to anxiety. Demyx, for his part, was cool enough with the situation to surprise himself, though he did take the time to glance around and make sure there weren't any green crescents to be seen. "All right...we're going to need an ambulance, then. Have to call one...you can stay conscious while I do that, right?"

"Eas'r said th'n done, Doc..." Oh, wow, the world was actually starting to do some funny things now. Getting all fuzzy and crap. No question about it; the Doctor's shoulder was the only thing keeping Demyx vertical anymore. "Iunno...maybe 'f I lie down, I c'n stay 'wake...ironic, innit..."

"No, no, you are _not _going to be lying down on the job right now if I have to slap you to keep you awake."

"...On th' job? Iunno, Doc...nah sure wheth'r 'm still onna clock righ' now 'r not. This...inn't e'zacly parta th'mission 'signment..." Fuck, it was starting to get dark already. How much blood _had_ he lost? Maybe he should go back to doing what the Doctor said earlier and not talking...oh, man, couldn't he at least sit down for a second? Shit, he needed to keep what blood he still had circulating as normally as possible, and do its level best to keep conscious with it, but...eh, fuck it. Concentrating was just too difficult right now. Maybe if he lay down for a while, he'd be able to focus...

"What about your friend, Demyx? What about Axel? You can't just leave him there, can you?...Hey! Hey, taxi! Over here! It's an emergency!"

"'mergency...? S'fine, Doc. Gonna be fine. Jus'...lemme lie down...jus' a sec...'n then we cn' go get Ax..."

"Demyx, I already told you, you will _not_ be lying down - taxi! Not be lying down right now! There's a taxi coming over, I'll get you to a hospital, and then you can lie down all you like, but _not now_."

"C'mon, Doc...so damn tired..."

"Look, Demyx, the taxi's here. We'll be on our way in a minute; you just have to _stay awake_. All right?" Demyx couldn't do much more than nod as the Doctor half-shoved, half-lifted him into...some...roughly car-sized vehicle; he was entirely too dizzy to even attempt to care what exactly it was, as long as the Doctor climbed in after him. "Take us to the hospital, quickly," he heard the Doctor telling the driver, as if he was a mile away. "It's an emergency - Demyx, I told you to stay awake!"

"C'mon, Doc," Demyx mumbled, barely able to make out his own voice and not caring why. "'m gonna be fine. Jus'...so tired..." Screw it, keeping his eyes open was just not worth the effort anymore. He was vaguely aware of a stinging slap against his cheek, but he was just too tired to care.

* * *

"...Ai, Ganesha. Cat nuns. Now that's...everything."

Demyx blinked, and was surprised to realize that had been his own voice babbling about cat nuns a second ago. He was at least as surprised to discover that the cat nuns in question were actually there, as opposed to being hallucinations of some kind. One of them, that might have looked like a Siamese if he could see her entire pattern, was hanging a bag of something white from an IV stand; the other, a calico, was pressing something against his bare arm, and giving him a funny look. "...Sorry," Demyx mumbled, aware that he probably sounded extremely stupid. "Been out of it for...crap. I don't even know how long."

The calico paused to enter something into a tablet that had been in her pocket, then seemed to do some math on her fingers. "It's been roughly six hours since you came in here," she said, her voice nothing less than professional. "How are you feeling?"

"Ergh...surprisingly not dead," Demyx answered, trying to sit up a little. They didn't try to stop him, so he presumed it was okay. "...Where's the Doctor?"

The calico seemed to think about that for a moment. "Sister Lith is the attending physician in your case," she finally answered. "Once you were stabilized, she was called back downstairs for an emergency overdose case. She will most likely be back up once the over-"

"I meant the guy who brought me here." It seemed so obvious now, that in a hospital, he should have specified who he meant by the Doctor. Oh, well, as long as someone actually found the man. "I...wanna see him. Let him know I'm not dead yet."

"Certainly," the calico said, though she was still fiddling with her tablet. Demyx had to wonder what she was doing, and what she thought about taking the vital signs of a dubiously-live patient that didn't have a pulse, since she hadn't mentioned it yet. "By the way, do you have any dietary restrictions or preferences we should know about?"

"Oh, good, that must mean I'll be allowed to eat," Demyx said before he could stop himself, and also took a moment to be grateful that despite the incredibly futuristic setting - based on the view of the outside, futuristic enough to make the Galaxy Far, Far Away look like a steampunk enclave - there was apparently still such a thing as real food. Unless it was actually some kind of processed edible material that would be flavored and dyed to mimic real food, but...well, if that was the case, thank the Gods he lived when he did and didn't have to stay here forever. "Anyway, I'm a vegetarian. Not super-strict - I still eat eggs and dairy and such. But - yeah."

"All right," the calico said, punching more things into her tablet. "Can I have your full name and date of birth, so we don't still have you in here as a John Doe? I suppose I should have asked that first, but oh well," she added as the Siamese finished what she was doing with the white IV bag and turned to her own tablet.

"My full name is Demyx Kumar Ghatori," Demyx said, for possibly the first time in his life to a stranger, because the Doctor already knew him as Demyx, it would be too confusing to have the Doctor calling him Demyx and everyone else calling him Edmy, and it just might be a common name in this day and age anyway. "Need me to spell that for you?" Crap, did they even use the same alphabet in this day and age?

"Ah, yes, if you could. The first and...well, how many names was that?"

...Well, crap. "Three all totaled. First name, D-E-M-Y-X, middle name, K-U-M-A-R, last name, G-H-A-T-O-R-I." The calico nurse tapped at her tablet for a few moments, then turned it towards him, to reveal his name spelled properly in a script he could comprehend. In Devanagari, rather to his own surprise. "Yeah, that's right."

"Excellent." The calico grinned, rather an odd effect, and took the tablet back. "Date of birth?"

"June first..." Demyx started, and then hesitated - if he gave his actual date of birth, he'd come across as being a hair older than five billion, which was just ridiculous. That, and did they even calculate the date the same way now? Stuck for an answer, he glanced over to the side, and saw a window - presumably to a hallway - mostly covered by a curtain, and a piece of paper in the one corner he could see out of that read "5.5/Apple/81". That made no sense at all to him, but he repeated it aloud anyway, in case it made sense to other people.

It apparently made sense to the calico nurse; she just nodded and entered it into her tablet. She seemed about to say something else, but then she paused and tapped at her tablet again, frowning a little, and turned to the Siamese. "Yin, there's just been a dozen more rage overdose cases in just the past hour," she said, partly talking to the Siamese - presumably Yin - and partly to the tablet. "Sister Lith is asking me to go down and help her." She tapped a few more things into her tablet, then wiped her frown away and turned to Demyx with a smile. "Anyway. My name is Novice Cait; this is Novice Yin -" the Siamese nodded on cue - "and if you need anything, just use the screen next to you."

She let herself out, and Novice Yin followed shortly after; the Doctor let himself in as she passed, carrying a folded bundle of clothing and a pair of shoes. He smiled when he saw Demyx awake and oriented, but it looked more forced than anything. "I brought you a spare set of clothes - something you could hopefully stand to wear when you get out," he said, setting the bundle down on a table. "How are you feeling?"

"Better than I had been, though I guess that wouldn't take much..." Demyx looked over at the pile of fresh clothes; he couldn't see too much detail with it all folded up, but there was denim, some dark grey sweatshirty-looking material, something black, and the shoes were a pair of black Converse, which nearly made him laugh. "How about you? You look sour about something."

The Doctor didn't answer immediately, just sat down in a convenient chair and stared off in some other direction. "I don't know if you've noticed, but your skin looks...awfully pale now," he said instead of anything relevant. "Must be from all that artificial blood."

"...Artificial...?" Demyx couldn't finish that statement before looking down at his own arms, and realizing that they were - hell, "pale" was an understatement; they were nearly ghost-white. Stunned, he looked up at the bag Novice Yin had hung from the IV stand, and did his best to read the upside-down text; it was tricky, but he could make out "Blood Substitute - Antigen And IgA Free - Safe For All Blood Types - For Use In The Following Species". And yes, the contents were whiter than snow. And Gods alone knew how many bags of that he had circulating in his veins instead of normal red human blood... "Shit, man, I look dead," he exclaimed, staring down at his ice-pale hands. "I _look_ worse than I felt before I came in here. Couldn't they, like, dye the stuff red? So it doesn't make people look so much like freakshows?"

"I think they tried that, but they couldn't find a dye that wouldn't cause fatal allergic reactions, so they elected to keep it white," the Doctor explained, seeming not the least bit fazed by how freaked-out Demyx was by his new skin tone. "It does wear off eventually, when the artificial blood breaks down and gets replaced with real blood. In eight weeks, you should be looking perfectly normal. Well, eight subjective weeks."

"Shit, man, that's almost two months. Axel's gonna think I actually died and came back when we finally catch up to him. He's gonna think I'm a ghost." Demyx shook his head, still staring at his ghost-white arms, and tried to forcefully remind himself that it was a temporary effect, and then that he'd already asked the Doctor a question that he wasn't answering. "So anyway. What were you looking so sour about?"

"...Oh. That." Clearly, the Doctor was in no great hurry to answer him, but Demyx was in no great hurry to not get an answer. "...It just bothers me that the Sisters of Plenitude are back, and still in the hospital business."

"...What, the cat nuns?" Of all the things the Doctor could have been worried about, like the fact that Demyx had had his stomach ripped open and had been transfused with enough white fake blood to turn him into something that looked like death-not-even-warmed-over-yet, or the fact that they weren't where and when the Doctor was trying to go and Demyx still wasn't sure when and where they actually were and wasn't sure the Doctor knew either, or the fact that they still had to turn around and rescue Axel at some point without any of them getting killed...he was worried about the fact that the hospital was run by a particular order of cat nuns? "Doc, seriously, if it's that big a problem to you, you could get me released and take me to a different hospital or something, but you are gonna have to tell me what makes this a problem to begin with."

The Doctor just stared at him for a second, as if not comprehending why Demyx wouldn't know this already, then shook his head slightly. "As far as I knew, they were all arrested after word got out about the Flesh in New New York," he said, seemingly as much to himself as to Demyx. "That was over fifty years ago now. They'd been finding cures for diseases whose cures shouldn't have been found for a thousand years yet, but the methods they used to develop those cures..."

"Wait, wasn't the New New York hospital where you wanted to take me in the first place? Speaking of which, Doc, where _are_ we?"

"Oh. New Boston. Which is actually about two thousand miles from New New York. And...well, even in spite of what went on there, the New New York hospital is still the best in this part of the galaxy, and it at least had the benefit of being familiar territory. But the New Boston Hospital is perfectly reputable."

"Shit, Doc, even a county medical center back in my own home time could deal with one bleeding gash, and I could have been transfused with real blood and not look like a freak. Then again...seems like here, they don't think twice about a patient with no pulse."

"Ah, yes. I told them that you were...some unusual species. Something that looked human but had different internal anatomy. You'd be surprised how many species out there are like that. I did use the term 'Meanwhile', but I daresay that's exactly what they think Meanwhiles are - some pulseless humanoid race they've never heard of before." The Doctor leaned over Demyx's bed, to tap at a touchscreen mounted into what, on a less highly-advanced hospital bed, would no doubt have been a simple tray. "Yes, that's exactly it. Species, 'Meanwhile', planet of origin, 'unknown'."

"For the record, Doc, we call ourselves 'Nobodies'. Since we're some_thing_, to be sure, but there's not really enough left to us to call some_body_ even by our own standards." Demyx wasn't sure why the Doctor might want to know that, but who knew, he might find it interesting. "And...if your explanation for where Meanwhiles come from is correct, then we might not really be the same thing. Just something very similar, in that we had hearts once and now don't, and are still alive anyway."

The Doctor gave him a questioning look at that, as if he'd seriously never considered the possibility. "...Where did those two nurses go?"

"Dunno, but one of them - Cait - mentioned being called downstairs to help with something. She said there were, like, a dozen new rage overdose cases that Sister something-that-starts-with-L wanted help with."

The Doctor seemed about to reply in a perfectly casual manner, but then he stopped, as if Demyx had hit him with a brick five seconds ago and he'd just now caught on. "...Did you say 'rage overdose cases'?"

"...Yeah...it sounded weird enough to be memorable...why? Does that mean something to you?"

"...I hope it doesn't. I hope I'm wrong. But damn those pharmacists if I'm not..."

* * *

"Novice Cait!"

Cait hated working in the emergency department, she really did. She preferred the relative calm of the upstairs wards, where even if the patients were in pain and unhappy, she felt like she could do more to make them feel better on more levels - talk to them, listen to them, help with the little psychological discomforts like loneliness or homesickness or even boredom. In the emergency department, the patients weren't homesick and lonely - no, they were in pain and miserable and that was all they cared about, and even if you weren't too busy attending to the physical-care side of things to talk, they'd mostly rather scream at you than carry on a conversation. And these were rage overdose cases, worse yet, just as likely to lash out and attack physically instead of verbally. But duty was duty, and these poor addicts were no doubt going to need someone to comfort them once they stabilized and came back down. Focusing her thoughts on that part, and not the part about trying to insert IV lines into the arms of patients who'd rather beat her to death if they could stand up without help, she scurried over to where Sister Lith was standing and beckoning her over. "I'm here, Sister," she said, quickly running over everything she should report while she was still speaking. "The John Doe with the abdominal injury is stabilized and conscious. I got his name and date of birth, and Novice Yin started the last unit transfusing."

"Excellent; at least one thing is going right today," Sister Lith growled, scanning over her tablet; Cait quickly brought her tablet into contact with it for a data transfer. "We just got another three in, including one who died in the ambulance. Sixteen overdose cases in...bah. We've lost three, including the DOA...ah, good. Sister Ran and Sister Vela just came in. The first OD to come in is stabilized and should be coming around soon. Get her...mentally stabilized and prepped for moving upstairs if need be, or to be released, but...you know what addicts are like. She's in E81. By herself."

"All right, Sister," Cait said with a quick bow, scanning over the data Sister Lith had just transferred to her tablet. The patient's name was listed as "Dallis Wanamaker (presumed)", meaning she must have had some ID on her, but was either unconscious or too far gone on entry to officially give her name; well, that meant the first thing Cait would have to do was ask her her name. She was a rage addict, after all (or so Cait assumed, but you had to use it to overdose on it, and new users almost never took that much); it wasn't unreasonable to think she might have wound up with someone else's ID in her pocket. Besides, asking a person's name was always a good way to start a conversation, and in Cait's experience, there were few kinds of patients who needed real psychological comfort more than a rage overdose case who'd just come down and was only now becoming aware of what they'd done under the influence. The hospital did have more than one psychologist on staff, but Cait prided herself on doing as good an unofficial job as any novice without specialized training could. And the better the unofficial job she did of it now, the more likely it was that she would one day be picked for specialized training...

But in the meantime, she had her job to do now. Pushing open the door carefully, she glanced in to see how the patient was doing - good, she was conscious - and get a real-time update on her vital stats - her pulse and brain activity had evened out to normal levels, and her temperature was only half a degree above normal. Good; that should mean the dangerous part was over for both of them. "Hello," she said as she made her way into the room, to get the conversation started in as calm and friendly a way as possible. "My name is Novice Cait, and you are...?"

"Dallis," the woman grunted, sitting up a little and brushing her lank dark hair out of her face. "Dallis Wanamaker. Fuck. Did I lose my ID?"

"No, but we are required to ask, not just take whatever the ID says...after all, there's a chance it might not have been your ID."

The woman - Dallis - grunted a few more words under her breath, that Cait was just as glad she couldn't hear. "Where's Clev?" she demanded, in a louder voice.

Well, that was hardly a question Cait could answer, but it did lead to more questions that could lead to a more in-depth, calmer conversation. "Who's Clev?" was the first question she asked, taking a cautious step closer to Dallis's bed - not too close; the woman still sounded a bit grouchy and snarly, which might mean the effects of the rage patches hadn't completely worn off yet.

"My boyfriend. He'd been doing rage with me. He was supposed to be here. He was supposed to be right the fuck _here_." Dallis started grabbing at her hair, her face contorting. "Where the fuck _is_ he?"

...Oh, dear. Cait still had no idea what might have happened to him, only guesses, but none of her guesses were pleasant - he might have been another of their overdose cases, Dallis might have injured or even killed him under the influence of the drug, or he might have simply abandoned her to her fate when the overdose took effect. In short, he was most likely in medical trouble, dead, or a cad. "I'm sorry, but I don't know where he is," she said, taking a few cautious steps closer. "Maybe if you could tell me more about him, I -"

"Goddamnit!" Cait flinched back instinctively at that outburst, until Dallis buried her face in her hands and started to cry. "I - I - fuck, I don't remember - if that bastard just - left me to die, I -"

Well...there it was. She was no doubt most of the way down now, far enough that she was no longer a danger to anyone but herself. "I'm sorry," Cait said, in as soft and comforting a voice as she could manage. No doubt, even if this Clev had abandoned her in her moment of need, Dallis would no doubt go looking for him again as soon as she was out and craving, but there was nothing Cait could do about that sad cycle today. All she could do was try to comfort this woman right now. "Maybe in a little while, when you're all the way down, I can help y-"

She didn't see the telltale flash in the woman's eyes until it was too late. She tried to scream, but Dallis's hands were already around her throat, and suddenly she had no breath left.

* * *

AN: It's Doctor Who. Of course there will be a body count.

Also, the Doctor might just be "Doc" forever.


	3. The Rage Vaccine 2

"Doc, if we ever get out of here alive and I wouldn't get in trouble for doing so, there's this guy I wish I could introduce you to."

"Hmm? Who might that be?"

"His name is Zexion," Demyx said, pondering the chessboard currently being displayed on his bed tray/tablet, wondering what move he could possibly make that wouldn't lose him the game in five moves or less, and blessing whoever was genius enough to include games on it for patients to play when they got bored. "He is the best chess player I know, but I have to wonder how badly he'd be thrown off by the changed rules. I'd hate to see how he'd react to some of the multidimensional chessboards."

"Really?" the Doctor said casually, as Demyx finally made a move and he countered it without even seeming to think about it. "I have to ask, who's the second-best?"

"It used to be me, until about eight moves into this game. Now I'm in third..."

"Well, for not playing by the same rules you're used to, you're not doing any too badly," the Doctor said, while Demyx pondered what move he could possibly make that wouldn't lose him the game in four moves or less. "Most of the great chessmasters in any age can only play by one set of rules. If you change one rule on them, they're helpless."

"Well, I'm hardly a chessmaster; I'm just - or, well, I was - the best chess player I know that isn't Zexion." Demyx squinted hard at the virtual chessboard, trying to find whatever weak spot he might have missed, in his own or the Doctor's defenses. "Then again...I do play Knightmare Chess sometimes. So I'm used to the rules changing in the middle of the game, let alone game to game..." Ah, yes, there it was. That was the out he was looking for, right there. "Just as long as I know what the rules _are_."

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully, pondered the board, and made his move, and Demyx realized that all he'd likely accomplished was losing the game in ten moves instead of three. "So as long as you know the rules, you're set?"

"As long as I know the rules and can get into my opponent's head," Demyx sighed, realizing why he'd been getting his ass handed to him all along. Despite the fact that he was currently totally dependent on the man, he really didn't know the Doctor that well, certainly not to the level he'd like for a chess game or a poker game. It was still awful damn hard to even try to guess what he was thinking, and as a result, he wasn't predicting his next moves so much as educated guessing, and not doing very well at it. Was there _any_ way he could pull a victory or even a draw out of this, or even delay his defeat by more than ten moves? All of a sudden, the screen flashed, and a red-bordered window appeared over the chessboard, and it looked like Demyx would suddenly have a little more time to think. "There's been an alert," he said, reading from the new window, since it was oriented towards him and not the Doctor. "Apparently one of the rage overdose patients that was mentioned earlier...she got out of her room, and they're not sure where she is, besides still in the hospital. And she's still crazy. And I guess rage must do what it says on the label, because it says she's dangerous and unpredictable."

"Yes, I believe it does," the Doctor sighed, muttering something unflattering-sounding about pharmacists as he stood up to make sure Demyx's door was securely closed before returning to his seat. "I thought they'd all been shut down in New New York, but I guess they just moved operations..."

"The pharmacists, you mean?" Demyx asked, as he cleared the alert and made one of the few moves he'd already found possible and not instantly destructive; the Doctor only nodded without offering more explanation. The game continued as before, but Demyx's odds were suddenly improving; the Doctor was suddenly making strange decisions, moves that would have made perfect sense a turn or two earlier, or that, if he thought about it, would have made sense a turn or two later...and suddenly the screen flashed again, and another red-bordered window appeared over the chessboard. "Another one," he murmured, clearing that alert so the Doctor could make his next move. "The exact same thing, just a different patient."

And before the Doctor could touch the screen, it flashed again, and another red-bordered window popped up. And another. And another.

Demyx cleared the first few, but soon they were coming so thick and fast that he just let them accumulate, to see how many there were all totaled when they finally stopped. "This is probably...not a good thing," he said hesitantly, as he finally started to clear them. "I...hope it means their alert system has malfunctioned, because there's...ten of them. Plus the two earlier. Twelve."

The Doctor frowned, standing up and moving the curtain aside to peer out the window into the hall. "...Demyx, you'd be all right if I left you here for a while, wouldn't you?" he asked, heading for the door as if his mind was already made up. "I just want to go check on what exactly is going on."

"Oh, come on, Doc, I'm a grown man, with some experience using nonlethal methods to fend off crazy people that want to kill me, and in worse shape than this," Demyx said, saving the chess game in progress to be continued later so he could look for a solo game to entertain himself with. "I do have a lightsaber, if it didn't get left on the TARDIS. If nothing else, it's good for hitting someone over the head. Or breaking out of somewhere in a hurry."

"...Um...yes, the lightsaber...is still on the TARDIS."

"...Okay, then, I can improvise."

"Good man. I'll be back as soon as possible." With that, the Doctor left, closing the door behind him, which both reassured Demyx and unnerved him. He was, after all, perfectly capable of getting out of any number of ugly situations without help, injured and uninjured, and he honestly wasn't feeling too bad right now...but then again, there were a dozen rage-fueled addicts roving the hospital, and it felt like the closed door was cutting him off from help instead of protecting him from danger, and did the damn thing even lock? Shit, he wished the Doctor had brought his lightsaber along; then again, it wasn't like he'd be able to know ahead of time that he'd need it...

While he was thinking of it, he might as well get dressed in the clothes the Doctor gave him, as long as there were no IVs sticking in him anywhere and he felt well enough to stand (and would rather not have to make a quick getaway in a hospital gown, if need be). He paused to inspect the original wound briefly, as long as it was exposed; it was very nicely sealed, no more than a long, thick line across his abdomen, but the sight of his own ghost-white skin bothered him too much to look at for long, especially the seam where his still-normally-colored left hand joined his real skin. And the Doctor had brought some perfectly reasonable clothes - jeans and a grey short-sleeved hoodie and a black long-sleeved T-shirt and even underwear and socks, and all in his size, too. He probably looked pretty good right now apart from the dead skin tone, he decided as he set the shoes aside and sat back down on the bed, and he certainly felt more comfortable. Clearing away one more alert without reading it, he started searching the tablet's game selection to find something that would keep him busy until the Doctor came back.

* * *

The hallway outside Demyx's room was as calm as anything, in the present moment. It was difficult to see whether it would stay that way or for how long - too many possibilities, all too close together - which made the surroundings a little hard to look at without something going on in the present. Since standing around trying to puzzle out which future was which and which came from where was a good way to accomplish nothing at all, the Doctor started towards the lift, intending to head downstairs closer to where things were currently happening, but his way was suddenly blocked by a wide-eyed nurse, colorpointed like a Siamese cat - one of the two he'd seen leaving Demyx's room earlier. "Excuse me," she said, fiddling with her paws and never quite making eye contact. "Are you...his friend that he was asking about? The Doctor?"

"Well...yes," the Doctor answered, looking her over and wondering why she was asking. He'd already found Demyx's room, talked with him, and played most of a game of chess with him, so if she was still looking for him for Demyx's sake, he'd already been found -

"...Are you..._the_ Doctor?"

...All right. "That depends exactly on who you mean by _the_ Doctor," he answered, though going by the way she said it, she almost had to mean him.

"The Doctor Matron Hame talks about. The one who freed the Flesh. The one who helped open the Motorway and the Undercity of New New York." The nurse seemed more intent on fiddling nervously with her paws than ever looking up at him. "_His_ friend," she added, with an emphasis that meant she wasn't talking about Demyx anymore.

Well, that was it; she definitely had to mean him. "So she's Matron Hame now, is she? Last I saw her, she was still Novice Hame. I knew she'd go far," the Doctor said, as much to stall her as anything. He was starting to see it now - he could see it, but not necessarily a way out of it. He couldn't even decide if it was a good or a bad thing that Demyx's lightsaber had been left on the TARDIS. Then again, if Demyx needed it, he could no doubt get it himself - but was _that_ a good or a bad thing? It was entirely too easy to forget what exactly Demyx was, when you were talking and playing chess with him, but that didn't change the facts.

"Could you help us? Please?"

...Well, that was it. "Help you with what?" the Doctor asked, even though he as good as knew what it was she was asking for help with, and it wasn't a stuck lift.

The seal-pointed nurse seemed to become even more shy and anxious, at that. "W-well...S-Sister Lith says that...these rage cases...all at once...it's not right..." she stammered, looking off into a corner. "I mean...s-some of these patients are - are repeat customers, you know...longtime addicts...been here before...but - but some of them...there's no history...not just no history...no patch marks. Old or fresh. Like they never took it. B-but the way they act...just like rage addicts...out of control..."

The Doctor nodded, as if he'd actually followed that cryptic, stuttered explanation, though he was still trying to work his way through it. "So...some of your rage overdose patients are...regular patients, you know they're rage addicts, so it's no surprise they're in here, but some of them don't seem to have taken rage in their lives, let alone overdosed now, but they still have the exact same symptoms? Have you performed toxicology tests on any of them to make sure they actually have the rage drug in their system?" he asked, mostly to stall for time before he started banging his head against the wall. If this turned out to be the Bliss virus all over again...he was checking Demyx right out of this hospital, going back to New New York twenty years ago, and simply torching Pharmacytown.

"Haven't been able...to get blood from...all of them yet...but...it's not just that..." The nurse switched to staring at a different corner, swallowing hard. "Cait's been killed," she suddenly blurted out, finally turning to make eye contact. "One of the patients - strangled her and ran off. And - and I _know_ Sister Lith wouldn't have sent her in with a patient she thought was still dangerous. At least not alone. It's not just...the symptoms in people who don't take rage. It's that - a lot of them - when they seem to finally calm down and recover - then all of a sudden - they start raging again, and -"

_And it's Bliss all over again, except without the instant death. Either the pharmacists have abandoned the patch form and somehow reformulated it to have a double hit, or this isn't just a drug anymore._ "All right, I'll help," the Doctor said, already able to see what was coming next. "Though I'm not really sure what help I can offer right now."

The nurse's eyes lit up for a moment, and she tried to smile, though all she achieved was looking a touch more hopeful and less desperate for a moment. "Then, um, come with me," she said, taking a few steps down the hall and beckoning for him to follow. "S-Sister Lith is in the security office; she's - taken charge for now."

"The security room," the Doctor repeated, following where she was leading, and wondering why they would be going to the security - right. Those alerts that had interrupted the chess game. The still-dangerous rage patients that had gotten out of their rooms and were now roaming the hospital...most likely ready to attack and kill anyone who got in their line of sight...including a hospital full of patients who could very easily be too weak to sit up, let alone defend themselves...and those that were strong enough to defend themselves - like Demyx - just might be the next to start roaming the halls, looking for people to kill.

Demyx's lightsaber was still on the TARDIS. Demyx knew that. And he could get there in an instant whenever he pleased. Whether that would prove to be a good or a bad thing remained to be seen.

* * *

_This game is actually a ton of fun, for a computer game._

Demyx was almost surprising himself with how calm he was, stranded in a hospital room five billion years in the future with crazy people roaming the halls and the Doctor gone off to Gods knew where. Maybe it was the knowledge that even if none of the worlds he knew of still existed this far in the future, he could portal to the TARDIS and be safe there in a moment. Or maybe it was just because this game was so damn distracting. It was like a 3-D version of Audiosurf, with him navigating around with his little player character like a spaceship, to a soundtrack made up of a whole new kind of music. The music was more addictive than the game itself, with strange orchestrations and - he would not be surprised to find out - instruments he'd never heard before, walking right on the borderline between harmony and disjointedness while still sounding pleasing to his ears...there wasn't a word of lyrics that he recognized as such, whether the lyrics had been stripped out by the game or the songs had never had any to begin with, but he didn't miss them.

_I wonder what kind of file format these songs are in_, he couldn't help but think. _Probably not one that's compatible with my MP3 player. Hell, I wonder what kind of portable music player they have in this day and age. Maybe it's permanently implanted into people's brains, and they download more music from an ever-present wireless connection. That would be kind of freaky, actually, to have your brain permanently connected to the Internet. I wonder what kind of hearing aids they use...maybe they have some kind of instant surgical fix for hearing loss no matter what the age..._ Distracted by his own thoughts, he blew by six targets in a row and plowed his character into an immovable brick, forcing him to start the level over. All right, next time, he was going to have to stop woolgathering and actually focus on the game...which really explained why he was so bad at games that didn't revolve around music; there was nothing he wanted to truly focus on and no freedom to let his mind wander...

Suddenly, the holographic game setting vanished with a high-pitched tremolo note, and he was left with the flat tablet screen, showing a 2-D version of his interrupted game and a blue-bordered message box that read "Incoming Communication: Accept? Yes/No". Who in this day and age would be trying to contact him right now without being able to walk into his room? The only one he could think of was the Doctor, though why the Doctor wouldn't be able to just come back in was beyond him. Not sure what else to do, he pressed "Yes", and was greeted by the Doctor's face on the screen. "How are things going up there?" the Doctor asked before he could say anything. "No disturbances, nothing much going on?"

"Nothing. I was just playing a game when you called," Demyx said, wondering if it was possible to turn the video chat 3-D, how creepy it would be if it was, and failing that, how to hang up or call back if need be. "Haven't heard a thing about anything since the alerts." Where was the Doctor right now? Demyx tried to get a good look at the background, but wasn't able to see much more than, well, more cat nuns. "I don't suppose you've heard anything more about anything than I have?"

"Um..." All right, that probably wasn't a good sign. "Well, I can tell you that the...doctors and nurses think that there's something very strange about having all these overdose cases for one drug at the same time. It's certainly unusual."

...All right, yes, Demyx could see how it would be weird, but he could sense that there was something else weird going on - something the Doctor wasn't telling him. "That's interesting, so what else is going on?" he prompted, trying to make him open up some. "A whole bunch of ODs for the same drug as once is odd, yes, but do they have any suspicions why they're getting so many? Is it April 20th? Did the dealers just start offering loyal-customer discounts? Free samples?"

"Worse."

"Worse. How much worse?"

The Doctor glanced to the side, as if wondering whether or not to answer at all, before turning back to face him/the camera/whatever. "They actually suspect th-"

All of a sudden, the view spun crazily for an instant before the Doctor's face disappeared from the screen, replaced by Demyx's paused game and a new blue-bordered message reading "Connection Severed - Redial? Yes/No". He promptly hit "Yes", and was treated to the word "Connecting" flashing a few times before being presented with "Connection Refused - Redial? Yes/No". "Dammit, Doc," he muttered as he hit "Yes" again, only to be presented with the same message. "You called me first, and all of a sudden you hang -"

_Bang!_

He jumped, hearing something slam loudly against one of the outside windows that did not sound friendly. It didn't take a psychic to guess what it might be. Good thing all that artificial blood had him feeling as lively as usual - but was that for real, or just a temporary effect? Could he last in a fight if he had to? Would his stomach wound reopen if he tried? Was he safer staying here and hoping whoever it was didn't break in, or portaling back to the TARDIS? Where was the TARDIS? Where was the Doctor? Shit, if only he'd been able to see more of the Doctor's surroundings, he might be able to portal there, but too late now...

_Bang!_

At least the window seemed sturdy. After two solid impacts, it hadn't even started to crack, so far as he could tell. Just as long as whoever it was didn't try the door - did the door even lock? He wished he knew - he wished he'd thought of that earlier...

..._Click_.

No, it didn't lock, or the Doctor simply hadn't locked it. And whoever had been banging on the windows had just opened it right up.

Demyx blessed current standards of medical care and jumped for the far corner of the room, as a bedraggled-looking woman with lank dark hair shoved the door open and barged in. "Clev?" she demanded, her eyes locking on him with a dangerous glint. "No. No, you're not Clev. Dammit, where the fuck is he?"

"I don't know," Demyx said, trying to stay calm and think clearly because his odds of having to either run for his life or fight his way out of here were looking really high right now. "I don't even know who Clev is, so -"

"Fucking idiot!" The woman ran at him suddenly, and Demyx was still wondering what he might grab to defend himself with or hide under when she grabbed him by the collar and started punching him in the face. He had to grab her arm and shove her back to make her stop, and even then it wasn't for long. "Where is he, Goddamn you?" she kept demanding, while Demyx kept a death grip on her arm in order to keep it away from his face. "Tell me where the fuck he is! _Tell me where the fuck he is!_"

"I don't know!" Demyx shouted right back, doing his level best to not let the crazy woman strangle him, while she did her best to do just that. "I don't know who he is, I don't know where he is, and I don't know why the fuck you think I would!" That only made her angrier, as she struggled to injure him further by any means possible, until he finally managed to shove her away. She stumbled backwards and fell, hitting her head on the chair on the way down with a sound that made Demyx wince, and didn't get back up.

..._Gods, I hope I just knocked her out. Gods, please let me have just knocked her out._ But he could already tell that she was entirely too still to just be unconscious. Just to be sure, he checked her pulse and her breathing, and found - nothing.

He tried very hard to be sick on the spot - he even leaned over something that looked enough like a trash container to satisfy him, just in case it might be easier to bring something up if he had somewhere to put it - but nothing doing; all he accomplished was making some horrendous gagging and choking noises and making his stomach hurt more than it already did. There was just nothing in there to come out. In a way, good, he didn't make a mess of the room, but still, how was he going to eat again this week...he did feel something liquid trickling down his chin, and wiped it away to see what it was, but it turned out to be something cotton-candy pink that bore no resemblance to anything he remembered eating recently. The motion reminded him that his face hurt, and he had to go find something resembling a mirror to see the damages. There was one in the little side room that he had to assume was some kind of bathroom, and he looked into it to see a deathly-pale man with hearing aids, whose left hand was somehow a normal flesh tone. The man's face had no bruises that he recognized as such, but his right eye seemed to be swelling shut, and his lips were definitely swollen and oozing more of that pink stuff.

_White plus red equals pink. That's probably blood._

All right. He should probably let someone know that the woman - presumably one of the rampaging rage cases - was...had hit her head on the chair and died. He hadn't wanted to kill her, he hadn't meant to kill her, he'd just been defending himself from someone who wanted to kill him. How did he call someone on this thing? He'd figured out his way around the "Games" part of the tablet, with the Doctor's help, but figuring out how to make a call without him...all right, "Games" was a sub-menu of something, and there had to be a way to get back to the source menu. "Games" turned out to be a sub-menu of "Applications", which also didn't offer any clues on how to make a call. Backing up one menu further gave him an option called "Contact", and touching that gave him a handful of options, such as "Nurse" (with the subheading "Novice Cait"), "Reconnect with last contact", "Intra-network (New Boston Hospital) (Type name/room #)", and "Out of network (Type contact #)". "Reconnect with last contact" produced a pop-up window with the options "Outgoing", "Incoming", and "Unsuccessful", but rather than try that (since that would presumably go back to whatever tablet the Doctor had borrowed to contact him, and his connection had been rejected twice in a row), he tried contacting Novice Cait. After all, that was what she'd said to do if he needed anything...but all he got was a blue-bordered message saying "Connecting" for a good five minutes before it changed to "No response: Reconnect? Yes/No". He touched "Yes", with a sinking feeling, and got the same response - "Connecting" followed by "No response: Reconnect? Yes/No". Shaking his head, he went back and tried "Reconnect with last contact/Incoming", hoping the Doctor might answer him this time (and that it was the Doctor he was contacting), but that connection also timed out with "No response". He was alone in his room with a dead woman and no way to contact anyone.

_All right. Shit. Don't panic, don't panic,_ he reminded himself, though he could feel himself start to sweat and hyperventilate. _Don't panic, don't panic, just don't fucking panic..._

All of a sudden, the tablet let out a high-pitched tremolo, and a message popped up that read "Incoming Communication: Accept? Yes/No".

_...Great. _Now_ the Doctor calls back._

* * *

"I'll let you have the tablet back when I'm done with it, Doctor," Sister Lith said, in a voice that would brook no argument even if her stony Persian face would have. "I haven't heard anything from Sister Ran or Sister Vela since they went down to the ED, and with the security cameras out, I don't want to wait for them to call me. You can talk to your friend again once I'm sure they're safe."

The Doctor could only look over at the nervous seal-point, Novice Yin, and shrug helplessly, already able to see how this would turn out - Sister Lith wouldn't get an answer from either of them, and meanwhile, Demyx was stuck upstairs worrying. "Out of curiosity, as long as we can't keep an eye on everyone at once, out of everyone in the hospital, what patients do we really need to keep the most safe and secure?" he asked, as much for the sake of talking as to determine where their priorities should be.

Only Novice Yin seemed to give this question any thought; Sister Lith was too occupied with her tablet to pay attention. "I don't know," she said nervously, as though afraid she might be yelled at for speaking up. "The - the mental ward is already well-secured, and - and I think Sister Merow said they were all locked down already...maybe the geriatric ward, but - " Her eyes suddenly widened, as she put her hands to her mouth. "The nursery. The neonatal ward."

Sister Lith visibly stiffened when she heard that, and her short golden fur seemed to poof out a little. "Oh, Santori," she hissed. "Novice Yin, you're absolutely correct. I should have called Sister Savin first." She quickly tapped her tablet a few more times, but was shaking her head in under two minutes. "She's not answering either. It's not like Savin to simply ignore a call; if nothing else, she'd answer to say she can't talk and she'll call back. We're going to the nursery; no matter what's going on, I have a feeling we'll do more good there than here. I'll call everyone else once we're there, and then try to get into the security video feeds." Without another word, she headed out the door of the security office at a rapid walk indeed, leaving Novice Yin and the Doctor to keep up as best they could without running.

Follow they did, Novice Yin because she'd been more-or-less ordered to, the Doctor because he had to call Demyx back at some point and Sister Lith still had her tablet. Despite the sheer immense size of the hospital, Sister Lith seemed so certain of her route and destination that she was still working at the tablet as she walked, trying to call other members of the hospital staff, checking on the last known locations of the out-of-control rage patients, looking over patient statuses...and all of a sudden, her tablet let out another high-pitched tremolo, and she stopped in her tracks so suddenly that the Doctor almost walked into her. He knew, without asking or listening in, that it wasn't Demyx this time, this was something and someone else entirely, and this was leading up to a very bad thing. "Ran, what happened?" Lith was asking the screen while the Doctor was already watching disaster play out. "Where are you? Is Vela with you?"

"I...don't know where Vela is," came the hoarse reply from the other end of the call. "I'm outside the emergency department...there's too many of them, Lith. I need help..."

Sister Lith sighed and turned to look at Novice Yin and the Doctor, as if contemplating whether or not she dared leave the two of them alone for any length of time. "...Continue on to the neonatal ward," she finally said, including the Doctor in the order despite the fact that he didn't report to her. "It needs guarding somehow, and I don't like that Savin's not answering. I'll be there as soon as I can," she added to Ran via the tablet, hurrying off elsewhere and leaving the other two standing there.

"Um...follow me," Yin eventually said hesitantly, continuing in the direction they'd been going. The Doctor had no real choice but to shrug and follow her, still trying to see how this would all work out. This wasn't a spate of overdose cases; this _was_ a virus, he _knew _it, even if he'd tried to soft-pedal and temporize with Demyx. Speaking of which, he had to get back in contact with him sooner or later, preferably sooner...well, with Lith out of reach, he'd have to borrow Yin's tablet instead. And - dammit, Lith shouldn't have left, he could already see that not ending well... "It's...not very far now," Yin was saying, though the Doctor was only half hearing her. "Just around this corner and down the hall..."

And then, around the corner and down the hall, the two of them almost fell over a huddled figure on the floor, its white robe splashed with red. Yin's hands were visibly trembling as she took an infinitely cautious step closer and gingerly turned the body over. "...Sister Savin?" the Doctor had to ask, even though he already knew.

Yin nodded tearfully, her eyes turning to the glass-walled room at the end of the hall. There were any number of incubators in there, some of them containing human or humanoid babies, some of them containing tiny kittens with their eyes still closed. "I can't see anyone else in there," she said, straightening up a little. "I...can't understand why Sister Savin would leave her ward without at least two nurses still in there, but...where could they be?"

"You'd better go inside and see," the Doctor said, still shaking his head over the body. "The babies do need taking care of...but can I borrow your tablet for a moment? I still need to call my friend back." Yin nodded, handing her tablet over reluctantly before letting herself into the room. Before following her inside, the Doctor scrolled through her patient contact list, finding Demyx's name without too much trouble - and all of a sudden, before he even saw Demyx's face on the other end, his blood started to run cold. He shouldn't have let Lith take her tablet back in the middle of his last call. But it was a little too late for that, wasn't it...

When Demyx actually appeared, one eye swollen shut and diluted pink blood drying on his face, the Doctor was already expecting it. "Glad I can finally get in touch with _somebody_," Demyx said, smiling wanly. "I wanted to let someone know that one of the crazy people broke into my room...she's dead now. I...kind of killed her by accident." His entire frame seemed to sag, at that; he certainly looked deeply ashamed of himself. "I'm a little bit dented, but other than that, I'm okay. I think. Just...feeling kind of...off right now."

The Doctor nodded warily, trying to see where this was going with no more information than he had. Was the virus spread by skin contact, blood contact, was it airborne? Did it infect everyone it contacted, did it cause symptoms in everyone it infected? Did it always cause the same symptoms? How long was the incubation period before symptoms began? "Demyx - I'm glad to see you're all right," he said, trying to choose his words carefully. "You'd best stay where you are. Barricade yourself in your room if you have to. Don't leave for any reason. We'll come back as soon as we can." After all, if he was infected, the last thing they needed was him coming to help them, and then having the rage symptoms kick in.

"Doc, just so I know...where are you? I can't really see what's behind you."

"Just more hallway..." The Doctor moved the tablet to one side, so Demyx would have a better view of the blank white wall behind him - but when he looked back at the tablet, Demyx had a twisted, crazed smile on his face and a telltale flash in his eyes, and he heard the unmistakable sound of a dark rift opening behind him.

* * *

AN: It's Doctor Who. The only rule that applies is Murphy's Law.


	4. The Rage Vaccine 3

"Come on, Doc, what are you running from?" Demyx asked, pressing his face against a window with that same twisted smile, as the Doctor did his level best to lock the door quickly, while the two of them were on different sides of it, and quickly discovered that it didn't lock. "I'm not that scary. I'm just an ordinary Nobody..."

"Ordinary is relative," the Doctor said, hastily glancing back to make sure Yin was still all right - she looked terrified, but yes, she was - and to see if there were any sort of shades on the windows he could use to block the view in. After all, Demyx hadn't made a dark rift from his room to here until he'd seen the hallway through his tablet - and wasn't that the sort of stupid mistake that would keep you awake at night for weeks kicking yourself. He should have done his level best to conceal his surroundings, not simply show them off...

_And now you just let a half-crazed Meanwhile loose in a hospital and led him straight to the nursery. Well done, you._

"Well, then...if ordinary is relative, I downright _suck_, don't I," Demyx said, baring his teeth. "After all, you're all _normal_. You _have_ hearts. I'm just a freak, a Meanwhile, a Nobody, whatever the hell term you want to use. I don't even have the right to exist, now do I?"

"Now, who told you that? It certainly wasn't me. You have as much right to exist as anyone," the Doctor said, doing his best to block Demyx's view into the room with his own body as long as he had nothing else. Hopefully, as long as he could keep him talking, he could stall him getting violent as long as possible.

"You almost let me die just for being what I am!" Demyx spat, the twisted smile turning into a snarl that was not the least bit improved by the swelling and bruises. "Ring any bells, Doc? I dragged my ass onto the TARDIS, bleeding like a fucking faucet, and you didn't even see me. All you saw was the Gods-damned portal. Do anything about the damned bleeding - no, first you were going to be sure and check my pulse, and then get as far away as you could once you were sure I didn't have one. Would you have run off like that if I did? Would you have freaked out like that if I'd dragged my ass in through the door instead? You seem kinda stuck for words, so let me tell you what I think - _no_."

"I'm sorry, Demyx. I was - just shocked that any Meanwhiles still existed. And that you were one. I swear, I never intended to let you die..." It should have been obvious - after all, he had sprayed the wound with instant coagulant and taken Demyx to the best hospital he knew of (or tried to and got slightly off-track). But it was only to be expected that sense and logic weren't going to have an impact right now. But what would? "Demyx - what about your friend? What about Axel? Remember him?"

"Fuck him. Stupid drunken bastard used to beat the shit out of me for fun. He can rot."

"Then why did you tell me we had to go back for him?"

"Why do you give a damn?"

"I'm curious. Going back to what you said earlier - about '_we_ call ourselves Nobodies'. Who's _we_? Are there more of you? How many?"

"Why the fuck do you want to know? So you can go over there, be a hero and wipe us all out? Fuck that..." Demyx was just standing there with a menacing snarl, pressed against the window like it was all that was keeping his hands off the Doctor's throat, but...he wasn't doing anything else. Just talking. Granted, the Doctor had wanted to keep him talking, but he certainly wasn't calming him down, and now he was starting to worry (even more). There was more to Meanwhiles than not having hearts, traveling via dark rifts, and being ridiculously difficult to kill. They had _powers_, strange and frightening powers, and there was no predicting what those powers might be. He still remembered watching the Gambler reverse time over and over on one particular Dalek saucer just so he could shoot it down again and again. He still remembered what happened to General Valstar, after he questioned the Sergeant's judgment a little too loudly a little too often, and how with one cold stare she forced him to regenerate over and over until his body disintegrated on the spot. Demyx couldn't not have some kind of power on that scale, it would be _ridiculous_ if he didn't. But what could he do, and why hadn't he done it yet? And what would happen when he did?

...Why was there suddenly water on the floor? Where was it coming from? The Doctor looked around hurriedly, looking for a leaking pipe or a broken sink or at least a visible source, scanning the room with his sonic screwdriver in case there was some totally unexpected anomaly there for him to find...but there was nothing, and the water level had only kept rising while he was searching. The floor was covered now, deep enough to cover the soles of his shoes, and it was still rising...and it seemed the door was so well-sealed even without locking that it offered not a single crack for it to flow out of, or into. "Doctor, what's happening?" he heard Yin ask fearfully, and when he looked up, he saw that Demyx was now leaning against the door, with a downright cruel smile on his face.

Water. How simple. How banal. How incredibly, inexorably deadly.

"Demyx, have you lost your mind?" he demanded, even though it was plainly obvious that yes, he had. "There are children in here! Newborns! Babies!"

"Uh huh," Demyx said, nodding, his eyes narrowing but his smile never wavering. "All those adorable, innocent little babies, just waiting for Mommy and Daddy to take 'em home and love them and treasure them...fuck 'em. They haven't done anything to deserve life, love, or a happy family. Sure as hell haven't done anything more or better than I did at that age."

...Well, it wasn't like the Doctor hadn't known Demyx's childhood had been pretty rotten. He'd tried very hard not to look too closely at it, because of how ugly the few glances he'd taken had been. But now, if he could just get at one of the reasons for Demyx's rage, the underlying emotion the drug/virus had built on, and do his best to knock that out or at least lessen its sting...preferably before the water got too high, because it had already reached his ankles, and he couldn't open the door with Demyx leaning on it... "What happened to your parents?" he asked, thinking quickly along any route this conversation could go in the hopes that, no matter what Demyx might say, _he_ would not say anything that would trigger an explosion, or take so long to calm him down that the water began to flood the incubators.

"Fuck me if I know," Demyx spat, his cruel smile slipping into a dark snarl once again. "I'm the son of an anonymous bitch and an anonymous bastard. Living proof of why you should always use a damn condom."

The self-loathing in Demyx's voice was downright painful to hear, but it encouraged the Doctor at the same time as it made him flinch. Just as long as he knew someone Demyx was _really_ angry at, and could convince him not to take it out on innocents...especially since the water was almost at his knees now. Now, what route was most likely to calm him down...? "If you didn't know your parents, who raised you?" was what he settled on. "After all, someone must have."

He'd made the right choice. Demyx didn't twitch physically, but his snarl went slack for a moment, replaced by a startled look, that was gone almost as soon as it happened but that didn't matter because it _had been there_ for an instant. "My - my grandmother," Demyx said, though his face was twitching like he _wanted_ to stay in a murderous rage but was having a lot of trouble maintaining that emotion. "Or - well - she said she was my grandmother. She sure didn't have a lot of information about my parents, though. I dunno. She fished me out of a garbage can, for all I know."

It was working. It was working. The rage was slipping, definitely slipping - he was calming down. Even if this was just a grace period before a relapse, he should at least be able to get Demyx to dispel the water - which was past his knees now, and still rising - and then get him away from here before the rage kicked back in. "Well, if she wasn't your grandmother," the Doctor said, choosing his words carefully, "she must have been a wonderful woman indeed if she was willing to take in an abandoned child and raise him like her own flesh and blood."

Demyx's face twitched, and the Doctor held his breath. His snarling expression started to fade, and the water level was almost at the bottoms of the incubators. The water level stopped rising, and the Doctor breathed again - but all of a sudden, one of the babies started to cry, and then another, and another, and the Doctor glanced back to see Yin wading through water that was almost waist-deep on her to take care of them - and he suddenly heard a strange growling noise from the other side of the door, and looked back to see Demyx's snarl had returned full force and as murderous as ever. Before he could so much as blink, Demyx was reaching for the door.

Things happened so quickly the Doctor couldn't sort them out for several linear minutes afterward. The first thing that happened, once he figured it all out, was all the water rushing out of the room, straight at Demyx; he had a vague impression that Yin screamed somewhere around this point, but he hadn't been paying attention. The only thing he was really able to think of was that Demyx had opened the door, and was coming in the room, full-on raging, and he _had_ to be stopped, except the only thing he had was his sonic screwdriver, and without even thinking about what he was doing, he pointed it at Demyx's head and activated it, and Demyx started screaming. The Doctor, too confused by everything going on at once to realize Demyx was screaming yet, couldn't see that he was clutching his ears with pale-pink blood on his hands, or that his snarl had been replaced by an expression of overwhelming pain, until the screaming finally caught up with him, and he was able to hear words in it.

"Doctor!..._Doctor!_ Make it stop...please, _make it stop!_"

But he was still a few seconds slower than reality, and by the time he understood what was happening and turned the screwdriver away, Demyx was suddenly on the floor, twitching and jerking like a fish on a hook.

* * *

_Oh, Gods above, I will make every offering any of you can demand if only one of you would please make my head not hurt. Or just...make it not feel like it just took a spin in a blender, would be nice too. And my tongue. Fucking ow. I need ice. And my _ears. _Why my damn ears? And the rest of my Gods-damned face..._

_Wait a second. I know this feeling. Oh, fuck, if I had a seizure on a mission that I didn't see coming...Vexen won't let me off the DL for a year..._

_...Where am I?_

It took some effort, but eventually, Demyx managed to pry his eyes open to find himself in...well, his first impression was of a generic hospital room gone specifically generically feminine. It was a very soothing shade of soft, dusty pink, which he was fine with in the abstract but maybe not in such high doses. There was a generic hospital crib next to his bed, even, which made him desperately hope that it wasn't occupied. He tried to sit up a little and look, which only made his head ache more, but as far as he could tell, it was empty. Which was a relief, it really was, because all the room needed to be the perfect place for some after-birth mommy-baby bonding was a soft lullaby soundtrack, and all his head needed to explode like a shot watermelon was the sound of a baby crying.

Okay. How did he get here? Where did he last remember being? What had he been doing there?

...Oh. Oh, blessed Gods above. What _had_ he been doing? Where was the Doctor? What about that nurse? What about all those babies? Oh, Gods, he could still hear that feedback...that piercing, penetrating, agonizing feedback...where was the Doctor?

And then the door opened silently, and the Doctor looked in and started talking, except Demyx couldn't hear a thing and the Doctor was looking at the ground instead of at him. Gods, where were his hearing aids? Where were his ears? All of a sudden, he had to check - his ears were still attached, thank the Gods, and bandaged, so the hearing aids wouldn't be any use even if he did know where they were. But his ears would heal eventually, so where were they? "Doctor," he croaked painfully, feeling how feeble his voice was even if he couldn't hear it, and suddenly lost all track of what he'd intended to say a second ago. Gods damn it, it _hurt_ to talk around swollen lips and a freshly-bitten tongue. "Doc...w-what happened?" was what he finally came up with, and then realized his answer wouldn't be any use, at least unless and until he actually looked his way or started signing. "I...can't hear a thing..."

Gods above, the Doctor looked about ready to cry, but at least he did look up. (I'm sorry, Demyx,) he said, and Demyx wouldn't swear that he _wasn't_ crying. (I...I didn't know it would have that kind of effect. I never meant to...seriously hurt you.)

"Well...I _did_ mean to seriously hurt you, so for the sake of self-defense, I'll forgive you," Demyx croaked, rubbing the back of his head - now all the various bruises he must have picked up during the fall were kicking in, making even more of him hurt. "I need ice, Doc. Cube to suck on. Bit my tongue." Did the Doctor know sign language? Specifically ASL or SEE? Shit would be ever so much easier right now if he didn't have to talk with his mouth, even if he had no choice but to listen with his eyes.

(...I'll see what I can do,) the Doctor said, still looking like he'd rather hide in the corner with a bag over his head than make eye contact, and quickly left. _I should have asked for something for the headache_, Demyx realized two seconds too late. Rather than try to call him back and have to talk more, he took another look around the room, now that he was feeling a hair less like his brain had just been poured out of a blender, and saw that this bed also had a tray with a built-in tablet, which would be nice if he had the mental energy to play so much as a round of solitaire. There was another table too, in arm's reach, with a loose pile of little squares that all had the green hospital crescent and the words "SLEEP-14" on them. He picked one up to look at, and discovered that the other side had the word "USED" written several times across it, in parallel diagonal lines, and there was a reddened patch on his right hand about the same size as the little squares.

_...Have they been using these to keep me out until they were sure I wouldn't wake up still raging? Gods, what the fuck time is it? How long have I been out? Shit, he's only been out of the room for a minute, but seriously...where's the Doctor?_

The door opened again, and the Doctor was back, with what looked like a small tube of toothpaste. He didn't say anything this time, just handed it to Demyx; fortunately, there were directions on the side that were easy enough to understand even in his dazed and confused state. Just apply the contents (a toothpaste-like blue goo) to whatever hurt, namely his lips and tongue...which worked, with the side effect of making his entire mouth numb. Now there was no way he was going to talk coherently without being able to hear himself. Sign language it was, if only he could figure out what to say. **Doctor, what happens now?** he signed, mostly hoping the Doctor knew, well, any sort of sign language. Well, if there was no other way to communicate, the tablet might have some kind of typing thing they could use like a TTY.

**They're trying to safeguard what parts of the hospital they can, **the Doctor signed back without missing a beat. Oh, good, typing would have been a bigger pain. **The rage virus is still spreading, and they're trying to protect the patients and staff who don't already have it.**

...Virus? Why wasn't he surprised anymore? Fuck, if he'd known that earlier...fuck. By the time it kicked in, he wouldn't have been capable of thinking things like "I should stay where I am so I don't hurt or infect anyone". Considering how quickly "I shouldn't hurt anyone" went by the wayside. He could have killed someone - he _would_ have killed someone if he hadn't been stopped - and now the hospital was filling with crazies who were all looking to kill someone? You didn't need weapons or powers to kill. All you needed was your bare hands and a bit of strength and cunning. And rage aside, he'd been as cunning as ever... **Is there anything we can do?** he asked, unable to tolerate the thought of lying around and doing nothing in a crisis, even if he felt like he'd been hit by a truck and couldn't hear a thing.

**I'm going to go back and try to help them stay in touch with the unaffected parts of the hospital, and see if I can get the security monitors running again,** was the Doctor's response; Demyx pretty much knew the next part before he started signing it. **You just...stay here and try to stay safe, all right? I don't want anything else to happen to you.**

_Last time anything happened to me, it happened while I was lying around staying safe,_ Demyx thought but had sense enough not to say. The Doctor probably didn't need to feel any worse. **Where are my hearing aids?** he asked instead.

**I have them**, the Doctor signed, before producing them from a pocket and setting them on the table. Demyx couldn't help but wince when he saw the pale orange stains on both of them. **I thought I might as well hold on to them for now, since they won't do you any good until they're repaired.**

**...Doctor, what did you do to them?** Demyx asked, more for the sake of asking than because he really wanted to know. As long as they could be repaired and his ears would heal eventually, "what happened" didn't matter quite so much as "what happens next".

Which did not stop the Doctor. **Well, I had been totally unaware of the effect it would have at first, but when I pointed the sonic screwdriver at you and activated it, it set off a #### #### ####, which in turn produced an extreme level of #### ####**, he explained before Demyx could stop him, using signs he didn't even recognize. **And since I was #### #### by a few seconds, by the time I realized what was going on, the #### -**

**I think I get it, Doctor**, Demyx signed, even though he wasn't even in the same ballpark as getting it; he just wanted the Doctor to stop signing before his eyes glazed over and melted. **Go save the world. I'll try to get some rest.**

**Take care of yourself,** the Doctor signed back, before heading back out, apparently not fast enough to suit himself if his speed was any indication. Demyx didn't mind; he simply started poking around the tablet to find a game that didn't require a functional sense of hearing to play...at least until he was sure the Doctor wasn't coming back any time soon. Once he was confident the coast was clear, he rolled out of bed, put his shoes back on, and headed out the door. No matter how he felt, he couldn't lie around as long as he was capable of walking. Especially if it meant letting the Doctor get in trouble all by himself - getting in trouble was Demyx's specialty, after all. And he just wasn't in the mood to have someone else spoil the fun.

* * *

"Doctor!"

Well, that had been remarkably fast. He'd barely even gotten down the hall from Demyx's room, and someone was already trying to get his attention. "What do you need?" he asked whoever it was without turning around - no doubt one of the nurses, wanting his help with everything that was going wrong all at once right now. More-or-less as usual.

"We - we just got word from Matron Hame in New New York," the speaker said, running up beside him - it turned out to be Novice Yin, again. "We'd contacted her earlier, to explain what was going on here, and, um...she's on her way. In person."

"In person? Why would she do that? As dangerous as it is..." The title "Matron" did indicate that she'd risen very high in the order indeed, didn't it? On the one hand, it was morally uplifting to have a leader on hand during a time of crisis; on the other hand, it was stupid for the leadership to put itself in unnecessary danger. And now there would be one more person he'd have to do his best to see through this debacle alive...seeing people through crises alive wasn't his _thing_. He did the best he could, but someone always died. From Sara and Katrina to Astrid and Adelaide...and there had already been losses in this crisis, the nurse who was strangled and the addict that Demyx had killed. Who would be next? Yin? Hame? Demyx? He didn't know; he couldn't see clearly enough. All he knew was that there would be more deaths.

"...Doctor? Are you all right?"

...Now there was a question he didn't get asked often. "Yes. Just a little distracted," he said, rubbing his forehead in an attempt to fend off an impending headache. "I don't suppose Hame mentioned specifically _why_ she felt she had to come in person immediately?"

"...No...at least...I don't think so," Yin said doubtfully; the Doctor took a moment to wish he was still dealing with Sister Lith. She'd been a very sensible, no-nonsense sort, not the sort to stutter and temporize and be uncertain about things...unfortunately, _had been_ was probably the correct tense at this point. "She...she only said that...she had a feeling we'd need her."

"Need her. I see." The Doctor closed his eyes for a moment, trying to puzzle out all the infinite factors in play, where exactly Hame fit or would fit in, and whether her presence would be a saving grace, an utter disaster, or completely irrelevant...it wasn't happening. That damned headache kept getting in the way. "She's already left New New York, hasn't she? Is there any way we could...no, never mind." He was aware that there was almost certainly a way to get in touch with her en route, in time to ask her what she was thinking or convince her to turn back, but...it simply didn't seem worth the effort. Why was _he_ even here? He was simply not in the mood to save the universe again right now; it ought to stay saved for a few years without his help for once, though he had yet to find when those few years were. He hadn't come here on purpose at all; the only reason he'd come to this world and this general time period was to save Demyx...

_You came this far out of your way to save a misbegotten freak of temporal manipulation that probably would have been better left to die, and look what you get as a result. The pharmacists are back and spreading _more _deadly viruses, and it's your job to save the world again. Casualties to be determined, possibly amounting to everyone around you, again. Well done, you._

What had he been here to do? He'd told Demyx he was going to see if he could get the security monitors working again, or at least keep all secure parts of the hospital in touch. Well, he was having none of that now. These people could figure out a way to save themselves or die for letting the pharmacists in. He might look into the climate-control system, the way the temperature in the building was suddenly rising...no, he couldn't even be bothered to do that. All he was going to do was return to the TARDIS and get off this planet, after dealing with his excess baggage. If only he'd let that abnormality bleed out and die, instead of just _having_ to try and save him, the freak might have been the only casualty, or at least the only casualty that he had to know about. Without even thinking about it, he turned around and headed back towards Demyx's room, that wibbling idiot Yin following behind like a lost kitten, intending to fix his first mistake and get out.

It would just figure that Demyx's room was empty.

That was the very last straw. "Where is he?" he asked Yin, trying to keep his voice even and his temper under control - but why bother? She was nothing more than a mayfly compared to him - a pitiful little short-lived thing, so far below him she wasn't even worth his notice. No one on this world was worth his notice, now that the Face of Boe was dead - no one except that _anomaly_, and now this stupid wibbling mayfly was preventing him from removing it from the universe. He wasn't sure how, only that it was somehow her doing.

"I - I don't know," Yin said, looking suddenly terrified as she backed away a few steps - let her; she was right to be afraid of him. "He may have - left on his own - and -"

Damn the little coward! He had an anomalous freak to eradicate, and this spineless little mayfly was _not_ going to stand in his way... "I asked you a simple question!" he shouted, grabbing Yin by the throat and shoving her against the wall. If she wasn't intelligent enough to answer one simple question, then let her try to answer it without oxygen. "_Tell me where he is..._"

"What's up, Doc?"

He barely had time to recognize the voice before something hard and heavy cracked against the back of his skull.

* * *

AN: And...what do you do when you can't trust the Doctor?


	5. The Rage Vaccine 4

On the one hand, the Doctor's headache was even worse now. On the other hand, he knew exactly who was to blame for it, and better yet, he was _right there_, ready to simply remove from this universe and have done. But if there was a third hand...well, lightsaber. It wasn't ignited right at that moment, but it wasn't the sort of thing you owned because it looked nice over the fireplace, especially if you didn't even live in the so-called Galaxy Far, Far Away. You owned it because you knew how to use it, and not just as a bludgeon. As badly as the Doctor wanted to just erase that anomaly already, he had no choice but to let go of Yin and back away, a circumspect distance from Demyx and his weapon. Demyx promptly moved between him and Yin, keeping his eyes fixed on the Doctor, as if he had some intention of defending her. "Oh, so now you're going to play the hero," the Doctor spat, simultaneously amused and disgusted by the idea that such an...abomination might be able to delude itself into thinking it could serve any good purpose in this universe. Of course it couldn't, when it was standing against him. He was the _Doctor_; _he_ was the only one out of this whole host of mayflies with the proper perspective to know what was right and good and what wasn't. At any rate, Yin was only a minor irritation, compared to the Meanwhile itself.

"No, I'm going to stand right here between you and the nice lady you were just choking the shit out of a second ago, in the hopes of stopping you from trying again," Demyx said, in a loud but otherwise calm voice. "I've tried that hero thing before, and it never seems to work out well. Let's see, I've been shot, tortured, set on fire, got trapped in the Superdome for most of a week...I must be forg-"

It shouldn't have started talking; it shouldn't have allowed itself to be so distracted. The Doctor knew full well it couldn't hear a thing right now, and the swelling around one eye meant it probably wasn't seeing too well on that side either. When it glanced away for one moment, he attacked, knocking the Meanwhile off its feet and slamming its head into the wall with a loud crack. Unfortunately, it seemed to be every bit as hard-headed as he was; it was back on its feet before he had time to do anything else, with the lightsaber ignited this time. "Stand _down_, you idiot," he commanded, feeling frustrated. "After I eliminate you here, I'm getting back in the TARDIS and going back to make sure you were never born!"

"Great; then you can have already stepped off the TARDIS in Sligo and been eaten by Vashta Nerada because no one was there to warn you what was up," Demyx said, almost cheerfully, keeping the lightsaber blade firmly in the Doctor's way. "Wouldn't _that_ make one holy mother of a paradox. Honestly, Doc, most days I'd say that stopping me from ever existing would be doing me a favor. It's you I'm trying to look out for right now."

"Oh, that's wonderful. That's brilliant, if you can explain why in the name of all eternity I would ever need the help _or_ protection of some...barely-existent temporal _glitch!_"

"For fuck's sake, Doc, you're sick! Rage virus? Spreading throughout the hospital? Do you recall any of that?"

Recall any of that? What did this little anomaly think he was? He could recall the funeral of the very first victim of the Black Death in England, linear centuries before Demyx's great-great-grandfather ever looked at his/_its_ great-great-grandmother and decided he might like to get to know her better, and even more distant than that in the Doctor's experience. But the idea of him being infected with the pharmacists' latest mistake? Ridiculous. He was the _Doctor_, not one of these miserable little mayflies. He was the last of the Time Lords; he was above this trivial mortal nonsense, and certainly not vulnerable to their silly little diseases. "If you're suggesting I've lost my mind to some...contaminated drug, you are sorely mistaken," he said, circling slowly around Demyx and watching how he reacted. His confidence was rising steadily as he considered the fact that he hadn't heard even one knock, except for when Demyx's head hit the wall, and certainly not four. That lightsaber, however dangerous and intimidating it might be, was _not_ going to kill him. "It would be much more accurate to say that I've come to my senses about you."

"Doc, if this is what you call your senses, I really preferred your insanity," Demyx said, continuously turning to face the Doctor as he circled - but it had to, didn't it? It was absolutely stone deaf, wasn't it? It was only able to track him by sight, wasn't it? That meant that as soon as visual contact was broken, it was helpless. Smirking faintly to himself, the Doctor mimed reaching into his pocket and throwing something across the room; Demyx glanced in the direction he mimed throwing something in...and the Doctor caught it by surprise again, grabbing its wrist to keep the lightsaber under control and slamming its head against the wall again. This time it seemed to have a real impact, if the way its eyes glazed over for a second was any indication. "Come on, Doc, I've had worse done to me in a barfight," it said, struggling to get the lightsaber away from him, but its voice was less steady now, and it seemed a little off-balance. "You don't want me to _really_ start fighting."

Start fighting? What an amusing notion. The error thought it actually _could_ fight against the only survivor of the Time War. It had started out weak, and was only weakening further. The Doctor only needed to throw his full weight against it one more time, slamming its head into the wall, and the lightsaber was in _his_ hand now. The Meanwhile was helpless now; he had it pinned to the wall, he had its weapon, there was nothing stopping him from striking now and wiping the anomaly out...

Even he couldn't figure out what he was waiting for.

"How does it feel, staring death in the face and knowing you can't outrun it anymore?" he asked, rather to his own surprise, though he told himself there was really no reason _not_ to drag things out and taunt the Meanwhile a little, as much as there was also no reason _to_ do so. "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot - you don't even really understand the concept, do you? Do you remember _anything_ of what it's like to be real?" He stared challengingly into the Meanwhile's eyes, looking for that telltale emptiness, the proof that he wasn't dealing with anything real, only the ghost of something that might have been...but all he saw was terror.

"Don't do this, Doc," the Meanwhile was whispering, tears running down its face. "Don't...you'll never be able to forgive yourself if you do. Please." It had to be a trick, a ploy to gain his pity. He'd already seen what this particular Meanwhile could do with water; faking tears was doubtlessly child's play to it...

_He's only a child. He's only a child, and he's terrified. Scared witless, and he's crying..._

Him? No, definitely _it_. This thing didn't qualify as a living being. It was a ghost at best - the shadow of something that could have been until the twists of time erased it, the false future of someone already dead.

_Then he's the ghost of a dead child. The last gasp of something that never had a chance. That's not a monster, that's a tragedy._

It was nothing more than an error with a physical presence. A visible reminder of a glitch somewhere in the timestream. It wasn't supposed to exist - it _didn't_ exist. It would be better for the universe as a whole if the error was fixed and the glitch was removed.

_He's terrified. He doesn't want to go - he doesn't want to die. But he can't escape...he has nowhere to run..._

Whatever it wanted, or pretended to want, was irrelevant. It needed to be erased for the good of the universe.

_Why? What harm has he done? He never filled Sligo with Vashta Nerada. And that other world was dying of natural causes, had been since before humans evolved on Earth. Scavenging isn't the same as killing._

It had to be destroyed. It had to be exterminated.

_Exterminated?...What are you?_

He was the last of the Time Lords, damn it. He was the oldest, most powerful creature in this universe. Whatever he wanted, that was how it was going to be, because he could damn well make it so.

_You did a brilliant job saving Adelaide, didn't you? Not to mention Astrid and the Van Hoffs and Banakaffalata? And Donna is still your best mate and still happily wandering around time and space with you...and Jenny came along with you, saving planets, rescuing civilizations, defeating creatures, and doing an awful lot of running and everything...and you and Rose got to live happily ever after..._

_Why are you at this hospital in the first place? Because you wanted to save Demyx. And now he's about to die anyway, not because you tried to save him and failed, but because you just decided you'd rather kill him instead. You had a gun to General Cobb's head and still swore you never would, and you're throwing that out the window just because it seems like fun right now. Well done, you._

The lightsaber blade hissed out of existence, and the handle clattered to the floor as the Doctor let go of Demyx's collar and backed away a step - but he shouldn't have done that. He shouldn't have dropped the weapon. He needed to destroy that glitch and get away from here, before he got swept up in yet another idiotic mortal drama and the situation went completely to hell around him again...he dove for the lightsaber, simultaneously wondering what the hell he was doing, but Demyx had his foot firmly planted on it now, and trying to get it away from him was just begging for a kick in the face. He had to destroy the abomination, absolutely had to...but he did not want to, and he _was not going to_, except everything that was going wrong in the universe was somehow the Meanwhile's fault for existing even though he knew it wasn't even Demyx's fault that he was the way he was...he stood up again and swung at Demyx with his fists, and missed because he really didn't think he wanted to hit him after all. Demyx's eyes were still wide with fear, and the Doctor just kept coming after him because he absolutely _had_ to kill him, just as much as he absolutely _had_ to save him...

What was that on the back of his neck? It certainly wasn't water; it felt more like a slip of plastic, or cellophane...wait, where had Novice Yin reappeared from all of a sudden? He could have sworn she'd run off as soon as he wasn't looking her way, but there she was again...what was that on the back of his neck? The Doctor reached up to brush it away, suddenly feeling exhausted beyond all comprehension, and found a small patch with a green crescent and the word "SLEEP-14" on one side and the word "USED" printed over and over on the other...

* * *

"I'll...I'll carry him. I've already been infected; I..._should_ be immune. If nothing else...I'd recognize the symptoms."

Demyx didn't hear Novice Yin's reply, if there was one, mostly because he couldn't hear anything right then. He wasn't a hundred percent sure he'd be able to read her lips if he tried, but he wasn't trying right then; getting the Doctor off the floor without waking him up was taking up most of his attention, and that damned headache was eating the rest. Gods above, he felt like the Doctor had used his head for a soccer ball for about half an hour, instead of a punching bag for a few minutes. And he'd just preemptively turned down the only help available. Oh, well; it wasn't like he didn't know he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed. And at least he was still alive. Surprisingly.

All the shit he'd been through in his life, and that was probably going on record as the ten most terrifying seconds in _ever_. Gods above, he was still shaking. He felt like he might never stop.

Well, he had the Doctor off the ground now, mostly, and in a position where he thought he could carry/drag him along comfortably enough as long as he didn't have to go too far - though if he started moving at all, other than breathing, Demyx was probably just going to drop him and run like hell. And the lightsaber was safely clipped to his belt, where even if he woke up suddenly, the Doctor wasn't going to get it without him noticing. "Lead the way," he told Yin tiredly, finally making something like eye contact with her. "I think...we should probably find him a room with a door that locks, if there is one." He could tell she said something in reply, but he couldn't tell what. As long as she started heading in a particular direction and beckoned for him to follow her, he didn't really care what she said.

Gods above, it felt like this hallway ran the full length of the hospital, and the hospital ran the full width of the continent. It didn't help that Yin kept pausing in front of one door or another or at one junction or another, and Demyx figured they were finally going to stop so he could put the Doctor _down_ already, and then she always kept going. Finally, finally they turned one corner and stopped, down a much shorter hallway with maybe eight or ten rooms, all of which had a small gray pad attached to the wall by the door. Yin put her hand on the pad for a moment, and the door swung open almost immediately - it seemed that, for whatever reason, these few rooms had been equipped with locking doors, and thank the Gods they'd finally found them. He was more than ready to set the Doctor down on a nice, comfortable bed, where he could wake up and recuperate safely..._way_ out of reach of the lightsaber. He also took the sonic screwdriver, because there was absolutely no point in leaving the Doctor in a locked room _with_ it. Once he left the room and shut the door, Yin beckoned him over to the pad, tapping her tablet against it and pushing a few buttons before gesturing for him to put his hand against it.

Then she started beckoning him to follow her back down the hall. Totally clueless as to what she was doing now, and unable to hear her answer if he asked, he simply followed her, to a nearby room along the main hall, where she made him sit down on the bed so she could attach a few wires to his head and do some things with her tablet, and then some things with the bedside tablet. What she was doing was beyond Demyx's ability to guess, but there didn't seem to be much he could do to stop her. All he could really do was sit back and watch her fiddle with her own tablet some more, until the screen on the bedside tablet suddenly flashed and a glowing blue ball suddenly appeared in the air over it. Leaning over to look at it - very carefully, to spare his aching head - he saw yet another blue-bordered window, this one bearing the message "Text Message Received - Novice Yin - Read Now/Read Later/Reject". Slightly wishing his head would just split open already and get it over with - it seemed easier than trying to carry on an intelligent conversation by any means - he pressed "Read Now". The enclosed message read _I need to return to the nursery, unless and until help arrives. If you start feeling dizzy, nauseous, confused, or unusually drowsy, or if your vision changes, please let me know immediately._

Boy, did Demyx wish he was a faster typer than he actually was. Yin was going to be all the way back at the nursery by the time she could read his reply - _If my mental state starts going downhill, that will make it harder for me to let you know. Especially if I have another seizure. Besides, what if someone else attacks? I've fought with worse injuries than a concussion._ Granted, he'd also gotten his ass kicked with worse injuries than a mild concussion, and he usually picked up the injuries in question during the course of the fights in question, but still. Besides, every instinct he had was crying out against waiting around anywhere alone; if he'd just gone with the Doctor the first time he got left in a room here alone, maybe neither of them would have been infected.

The reply, when it finally came, was not encouraging. _We can't afford any more serious injuries, with everything that's already going on. You really should stay where you are._

Demyx couldn't help but roll his eyes, reading that, and put a few moments' serious thought into just portaling back down there whether she wanted him to or not. Unfortunately, taking the time to think about it made him realize that he really wasn't going to be any practical help on the child-care end, and sitting around waiting for a crisis was something he could do just as easily here as there when he could portal there in an instant anyhow. And here seemed much more comfortable, especially with this headache. _Call me if you need my help_, was what he eventually texted back. _Don't waste time typing a message. Just anything that will get my attention. I can be there in an instant._ That, Yin should know damn well; she'd already seen him do it. The only reply he got was a brief _All right_, which was all he wanted. Now, as much as he wanted, he couldn't afford to close his eyes right then; instead, he drew the curtains, turned the lights off in the room, then fiddled with the tablet until he got it to generate a shifting, abstract hologram that would be easy and relaxing enough to watch for a while.

Gods damn it, he didn't want to lie around and wait for more shit to happen, no matter how much his head hurt. There was so much shit going on, that the hospital staff were damn well going to need help with, and he knew he could help _somehow_. Lying around watching pretty lights dance just stuck in his craw right now, especially with the Doctor out of commission. But where was he going to go? He'd told Yin to contact him if she was in trouble, and if he left his room, he'd instantly be out of the loop. If only he could take the stupid tablet with him. Then again, if it was possible to leave the room with it, it would be possible to leave the hospital with it, and if it was possible to leave the hospital with it, he was willing to bet they'd lose -

He didn't hear anything - he couldn't hear anything, regardless of whether or not there was anything to hear - but he sure as hell felt something. Some kind of impact, from outside the room. Dammit, he shouldn't have drawn the curtains. Being able to see out was about to be really important... Very reluctantly, he stood up and pulled the curtains back, to see that the hallway had turned into a bloodbath. There was actual blood, very fresh red blood, spattered over the window, enough to make him gag even though he hadn't eaten in he didn't even know when anymore, and more spattered across the walls opposite his room. If he walked over to the window and looked down, he could see the source, a not-very-lively-looking body huddled up against the wall, such a ripped-up wreck he couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman right off the bat. A quick glance up and down the hallway revealed even more blood, and at least two more bodies, and he was willing to bet that that wasn't all.

Gods above, what about the Doctor? No, the Doctor was in a locked room, which should keep the crazies out as easily as it was originally meant to keep him in; as long as he stayed asleep and didn't attract attention, any crazy who wasn't specifically after him should leave him alone. The Doctor was probably one of the safest people in the hospital right then. Demyx was probably in more danger - he was up and moving, after all, visible from the hallway, and his room was unlocked. What about Yin? Demyx couldn't tell if the chaos was traveling towards the nursery (in which case she was in danger) or away from it (in which case she might have been taken out already, and what about the babies?). Looking back at the tablet, there was no glowing blue message-ball, but did that mean Yin hadn't had any trouble yet or that she'd been overwhelmed too quickly to alert him? With no way of knowing, besides heading down there in person, Demyx saw no better option than alerting her first. _Things are turning into a gigantic mess here,_ he texted, hoping there was still a possibility for a response. _There's a lot of blood, and at least one dead body. I don't know which direction things are moving. Be careful._

Thankfully, there was a reply soon after. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very optimistic one. _I can hear fighting from down the hall. They're coming this way._

...All right, what would the Doctor do in this situation, with one nurse and a whole lot of babies to protect from Gods alone knew how many bloodthirsty maniacs? Not to mention - shit, there had to be adult patients in this hospital too, weren't there? Not to mention children who weren't newborn babies? What about, like, the really sick preemies who needed round-the-clock care and...depending on how fractured the staff was, might not be getting it? Was this hospital advanced enough to prevent dangerous prematurity altogether? Okay, he was off topic now...what would the Doctor do right now, to protect Yin and all the babies from the ragers? What would he do? What would he do? Well, Demyx had the sonic screwdriver, so hopefully it would be something involving that...but what would he actually do with it? Gods damn it, he didn't know. The Doctor would no doubt do something awesomely brilliant and save everyone who wasn't already dead and cure the virus altogether by dinnertime, but the Doctor was out cold in a locked room, and Demyx was not the Doctor. All he could do was what Demyx was capable of, which...at the moment, seemed limited to flooding places, kicking people, and cutting holes in things. And playing a lot of cool instruments, which was about as shit-worthless a skill as he could imagine right now. Maybe he could go out there and knock the ragers out with his sitar.

Wait.

_Is there any place in the hospital that's still safe, doesn't have any crazy people running around yet, still secure, and has room for the babies?_ he texted back to Yin. _If there is, you'd probably better evacuate. I can get you there. All I need is to see where I'm going._

The reply was long in coming, long enough to get really scary - should he have portaled back down there already? Had he been too late? Was the nursery already under attack? Had it been overrun while he was trying to think of what the Doctor would do? Finally, finally, Yin texted back - _The laboratory is still secure. I've contacted them. They're trying to make room._

That was as good as Demyx could hope for, he supposed. Quickly glancing up and down the hallway again, he turned his tablet off and portaled back to the nursery, finally feeling like he was doing something useful.

* * *

Sleep patches were really an inferior product compared to actual natural sleep. Natural sleep usually didn't leave one so stiff and achy, especially headachy. On the other hand, they were at least _some_ kind of restful, and a decent rest was always something to be grateful for. Especially considering how rarely he got one. The middle of a crisis, though, probably wasn't really the best time to take one...

All right. Where was he? In a hospital room, it seemed - a logical place to leave him, now that he thought about it. He couldn't immediately see anyone else, which did worry him; hopefully that didn't mean disaster had struck while he was out. Hopefully that meant Demyx and Yin were off doing something helpful somewhere else. Hopefully Demyx wasn't in emergency surgery with a skull fracture. Hopefully he wasn't dead of a skull fracture, or some other traumatic brain injury. He did have a history of those, which was the entire reason he had seizures in the first place, and they did compound over time...damn it. It seemed that rage, like so many other abusable drugs, had the side effect of making things you would never consider under normal circumstances suddenly seem like wonderful ideas. Even to him. Demyx had even _told_ him what was wrong.

_And the lesson of the day, yet again, is that you are not all-powerful and you are not in any way, shape, or form a god. You're just the Doctor._

And he wasn't being a very useful Doctor sitting around a hospital room, was he? He ought to be going and finding Demyx and Yin, wherever they were, and helping them with whatever helpful thing they were hopefully doing. The door was locked, which was only a minor inconvenience with a sonic screwdriver...unfortunately, he seemed to be without a sonic screwdriver. Well, if they were going to leave him in a locked room, taking the sonic with them made all sorts of sense, but he wasn't raging anymore, and he would really like to leave this room sometime. He supposed he could call someone and ask to be let out, but...well, Demyx had appeared perfectly calm and in control during that first call, until he'd suddenly teleported down and tried to drown everyone.

This was going to be a wonderful wait. Maybe he could call and ask if there was any food available; he was getting awfully hungry. And it wasn't like he could pop back to the TARDIS for a quick lunch.

All right, was there something productive he could do in here without the sonic? Well, he did have one of those ever-present tablets. Maybe there was something he could do with that. Now, given the date, the security monitors were probably one hundred percent wireless, so in order to take them all out at once, someone would have to damage the wireless transmitter, if they all shared one, or the wireless receiver, which was presumably in or near the security office. If it was the receiver that was taken out, shouldn't he be able to receive the wireless signals on his tablet? It must be capable of receiving signals in some way, shape, or form, though possibly not of the frequency at which the security monitors were transmitting...well, at the very least, he could see, couldn't he? And if the tablet couldn't receive the monitors' wireless signals, he could fix that, couldn't he? Might take a long time without the sonic, but...he _could_. First things first, he had to separate the tablet from the tray...it had to be doable somehow, otherwise how would they repair or replace the tablets if something went wrong? But it couldn't be easy, otherwise an awful lot of tablets would grow legs and walk out with their patients. Maybe there was a clue on the other side of the tray...?

All of a sudden, there was a face on the other side of the window - Sister Lith. She'd made it back from the emergency department alive, contrary to his own expectations. The Doctor turned away from the tablet and straightened up to greet her as she unlocked the door and came in - and then he saw the flash in her eyes.

"You," she hissed, unsheathing her claws as the Doctor backed away, mentally judging the distance between himself and the door, between her and the door, and between the two of them. "They say that you're a hero. That wherever you go, you're always just in time to save the day, aren't you? Right there to cure the latest disaster?" No, the room had entirely too little space for him to back up, and somehow too much space for Lith to advance on him. "No...you're a herald of disaster. Sixty years ago, you came and our order was destroyed. Thirty years ago, you came and the Face of Boe died. Now you're here again, and look what's happening to us." She slashed at him with her claws, ripping his suit jacket and barely missing his skin. "Cait is dead. Ran is dead. A hundred patients or more are dead. All the very day you arrive on the scene..."

"Wait a second; you can't accuse _me_ of spreading the virus. That's the pharmacists' faults," the Doctor said, carefully backing around the head of the bed, Lith still following and swiping at him as and when she could. "It must have started before I got here. The only connection between me and the virus is...an accident of timing..." There was nothing between him and the door now, and one corner of the bed still between him and Lith; this was the best chance he was likely to get. Kicking the brake off the handiest wheel, the Doctor dragged the bed in between himself and Lith, then ran for the still-open door and slammed it behind him. Lith vaulted over the bed and hissed and spat furiously at him from behind the window, but she couldn't open the door from the inside any more than he could. There were three problems solved at once - he was safe from her, she was safely contained, and most importantly, he was now out of that room.

All right, now back to being useful. The nursery had been rather the center of the action last he knew; now where was it? This wasn't a part of the hospital he was familiar with...oh, Rassilon, the hallway had turned into an absolute bloody mess since he'd last seen it, very literally bloody. If it so happened that one of those bodies contributing the blood happened to be Yin's or Demyx's...no, wait, Meanwhiles didn't actually leave bodies when they died, did they? They just sort of...dissolved. So if Demyx had been killed while he was out...

There was someone new coming down the hallway, and even from a distance the Doctor could see quite a bit of blood on them - and, if he wasn't mistaken, a knife. Glancing around quickly, he ducked into an unlit, empty room and crouched down below the window, hoping they hadn't seen him and weren't going to come in after him. He could hear them stabbing and slashing at one of the dead bodies in the hallway - and as much as he wished, he couldn't get rid of the mental images that came with that sound - but they didn't come in after him, which was the important thing. He could sense them moving off down the hall, as if they had no idea he was there, far enough to be out of earshot, and then and only then did he dare stand up and open the door...and it turned out he'd been looking at the near future, not the actual present. They were barely out of arm's reach. All right, this situation called for running, fast running, and a lot of it...

Wait, he thought he knew this stretch of hallway now. Good; this meant he had been going in the right direction, and the nursery couldn't be far now. Where was his knife-wielding pursuer? Well, not anywhere he could see, which was reassuring. Now he just had to keep going in this direction, and he should be back on completely familiar territory. Yes; there was the room they'd put Demyx in to recover after his seizure, which meant that at the next right up here should be...

"Oh, _no_," he breathed, pressing his face to the window - a window that should have looked out on rows of incubators and dozens of healthy newborns but was somehow not looking out on anything but a barren, empty room. There were even neat lines of divots on the floor to show where the incubators used to be and had been for years, but...where were the incubators themselves? Where were the babies? Where was Yin? Where was Demyx? If that knife-wielding rager had come this way before surprising him in the hallway...if only he'd been able to get out of that room a little sooner...

Wait. If there had been a massacre here, there would be blood. There was some spattered around the hallway outside, but none in the room itself. With that positive sign in mind, the Doctor looked hard at the room's past, trying to sight out just the right timeframe...and he could all but watch the evacuation in progress. It was brilliant, really, watching all those nuns filing through the portal to help get all the babies out of there, incubators and all, while Demyx stood guard at the door. Now if only he knew where they'd gone...and how to get in touch with them, wherever they were...well, there was Sister Savin's body on the floor, exactly where it had been when he and Yin first came down here. Presumably, she'd had a tablet, same as the rest of the staff. With a murmured "Sorry, Sister, but I doubt you need this anymore", he started searching her robe, digging through her pockets until he found it.

All right, brilliant, there it was. Now he was in business. Now, since this tablet wasn't installed in a tray, he could get back to work trying to pick up the wireless signals from the security monitors...but first he really had to contact someone. Preferably whoever was closest to Demyx, whoever that might be. Who was in her contact list...Novice Prin and Novice Dace, neither of which sounded familiar. The names of a handful of other staff members he'd never heard of before. The names of other departments - Ob/Gyn, Emergency, Laboratory - not helpful; maybe he should see if he could find specific people on the hospital network...wait. No. No, the best result that he could see, as little logical sense as it made, was from calling the laboratory. Where _was_ the laboratory in this hospital? He didn't know, but no doubt he was going to find out...

The word "Connecting" flashed across the screen for a few seconds, before being replaced by a brown tabby in habit and wimple who looked like she'd just had all the problems in the universe dumped on her shoulders and was fully expecting the Doctor to add to them. "Hello; who are you?" she asked, and somehow added "are you calling for some good reason or just wasting my time?" without needing to say it out loud.

"Um - well - I'm the Doctor," he answered, a little thrown off by the rudeness. Wait, there was a _lot_ of activity going on behind her, he could see people of all species and states of health milling around...and hospital laboratories weren't generally patient-care areas. By that token, the laboratory wouldn't have any crazed, infected patients running around. Yes, this _was_ probably where all evacuations were headed.

"Yeah? Doctor who?" the brown tabby asked, clearly unimpressed. "How many of you are there, and where are you?"

"Um...nothing. Just the Doctor. There's...only one of me, and...I'm out in front of the nursery..."

The brown tabby just snorted, looking slightly askance at him, before turning to someone he couldn't see. "Madiv, are Novice Yin and her magic friend back yet?" she asked the unseen third person. "Got another pickup for them, outside the nursery...well, good. Go get 'em." She kept looking at whoever she'd been talking to, until the Doctor found himself staring at the screen in case whoever it was would suddenly pop out and do something dramatic, and then the connection was suddenly severed as, for the second time that day, he heard a dark rift opening behind him. After what had happened the first time, he somehow found himself back inside the nursery proper with the door closed before he realized the rift was not a bad thing right now, Demyx was as sane as ever, and running was completely not necessary.

"Doc, I'm not gonna eat you, and neither is the portal," Demyx said, though the Doctor was more grateful that he was at least trying not to laugh. "I mean, it's _safe_; I use these things all the time. Probably portaled all over the damn hospital today. I don't think I even know the regular route to the lab from here."

"Well, that's good, I suppose," the Doctor said, straightening his tie and trying to pretend he wasn't embarrassed by his own behavior. "So I take it you've been evacuating basically the entire hospital to the laboratory?"

"Well, everyone that can come down safely," Demyx said, holding the door open for him. "Which, as long as you're not trying to kill me with my own lightsaber, includes you, so..."

"Right. Right. I get it," the Doctor said, staring at the rift as if it just might devour him as soon as he moved too close. Only the certain knowledge that many people who weren't Meanwhiles had traveled the exact same way in apparent safety got him to move any closer to it than he already was, and Demyx practically had to drag him through it. Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as he'd anticipated, though he'd expected something at best extremely uncomfortable and at worst downright nightmarish. And almost miraculously, on the other end of the rift was the crowded laboratory he'd seen on the other end of the call, complete with the sour-looking brown tabby.

"It's about time," the brown tabby said before the Doctor could do anything like introduce himself properly or ask her her name, gesturing at a leopard-spotted novice who promptly came over and started signing to Demyx. "We just got word. Matron Hame has arrived."

* * *

AN: How'd this chapter get so long?


	6. The Rage Vaccine 5

"Matron Hame?" the Doctor repeated, still thinking of her as Novice Hame and surprised to hear anything else. "Right, right - where is she?"

"Still on the roof, at the landing platform," the brown tabby said, tapping at her tablet again. "Could hardly go to the spaceport, can she? Santori knows what the city looks like right now...probably Hell itself, the way the virus is going. If it weren't for our magic friend here, the roof wouldn't be any good either," she added, jerking her chin in Demyx's general direction. "If it weren't for him, most of us would be bloody dead, yourself included."

Well, the Doctor had to question that statement as it applied to the current situation, but he was willing to believe it in general, seeing as he hadn't been eaten by Vashta Nerada in Sligo. What had him more concerned was the fact that Demyx was suddenly leaning on a table, propping himself up with both arms and looking about ready to fall over completely. "Demyx, are you all right?" he asked, before remembering that Demyx wasn't going to hear the question anyway and repeating it in sign language. **You look exhausted**, he added as Demyx looked up and gave him a dull stare.

"I _am_ exhausted," Demyx said, apparently so much so he couldn't stand on his own two feet alone long enough to get his hands off the table and sign. "Exhausted and I have the mother of all headaches, thanks. More than that, I'm _hungry_. I haven't eaten in Gods alone know when, but it was before we met, I can tell you that much."

...**That's a bit too long**, the Doctor signed, once he worked out how long that had to be - thirty hours at least, and likely more. **You've got to eat before you seize again**.

"Think I don't know that, Doc?" Demyx sighed, reluctantly peeling himself away from the table as the Doctor tried to lead him to an actual seat. "The big question is, eat what?"

**We'll find something somewhere. You've done too much for them to let you go hungry.**

"I'm not questioning their generosity, Doc. But they can't give me what they don't have. You'd better move; I think Madiv is trying to talk to me." Unthinkingly, the Doctor stepped aside, as the leopard-spotted novice from before emerged from behind him and started signing to Demyx. Hanging back and trying to follow their conversation seemed rude, so...honestly, the Doctor wasn't sure what else he _could_ do right now. There was his earlier idea of trying to access the security monitors from his tablet...Demyx, to the best of his knowledge, still had the sonic, but that didn't mean there wasn't something he could do without it. At the very least, he could poke around as much as he could on Sister Savin's rescued tablet on his own. Surprisingly enough, just a few seconds of poking revealed an option to access the security monitors directly, but it required a password, which he knew he could figure out eventually but didn't want to waste time on if it wasn't going to help. The brown tabby with the bad attitude seemed to be the closest to "in charge" as was available; he really ought to ask her before doing anything that might destroy the tablet...but she was busy doing something involving Demyx and what was her name - Madiv - that looked too important to interrupt. A few moments later, he twitched as he heard a dark rift opening nearby yet again, and jumped when he heard something large hitting the floor, something organic that weighed about...well, how much did Demyx weigh? Something that weighed about 65 kilos, was his guess.

He made a quick mental wager with himself before turning to look, and won it when he saw Madiv and the brown tabby trying to help Demyx up off the floor, and Demyx looking like he was never going to make it on his own. At least it wasn't another seizure, but Demyx wasn't even trying to protest that he was all right. Was he even conscious? Yes, yes, he was, albeit just barely. **Demyx, you're shattered,** he signed as soon as Demyx was looking his way and had a clear line of sight, making sure to keep as far from the rift as he could comfortably get. **You're not doing one more run right now.**

"Well, someone kinda has to," Demyx drawled, looking like he was about to slide back out of his chair and fall asleep on the floor. "Or are we just gonna leave the old lady stuck up there on the roof? Don't shit me, Doc; you're afraid of the portal."

**...Well, yes. But you're still not going up there right now.** Besides, what was there to be afraid of, really? He'd already been through one of those rifts, and survived just fine. Taking a deep breath and willing himself not to think of anything even remotely connected to the Last Great Time War, he made his way through the rift, and emerged wondering how Demyx didn't go insane traveling like that all the time.

"Doctor? It's been thirty years, but you don't seem to have aged a day."

"...Hame?" Yes, that was Novice - Matron - Hame, and she'd aged much more than a day since he'd last seen her. "You look - well," he temporized, because it would have been rude to say the word he was really thinking of - old. "It's good to see you again, though I could have wished for better circumstances."

"We all could, I'm sure, but you seem to avoid better circumstances," Hame said, with a slight smile that further wrinkled her greying features. "But I expect the bad ones would happen whether you were here or not. How are things in the hospital?" she added, gesturing to the pilot waiting in the hovercraft she'd arrived in; the pilot promptly took off again, in the general direction of New New York.

"...It's a mess, to be honest with you. They've evacuated everyone they can to the laboratory, but..."

"The laboratory?" Hame said, examining the dark rift with perfect equanimity. "How fortunate. I was hoping the laboratory had at least remained secure. Now this is a curious thing, Doctor. How ever did you manage it?"

"I didn't. It's something a friend of mine did." All right, now the hardest part of this would be pretending he was as calm around that rift as Hame was, at least long enough to escort her through it. "It...it leads straight back to the laboratory. Despite appearances, it's perfectly safe, so, um..."

"I see. Very convenient." If Hame noticed how on edge the rift had him, she didn't so much as twitch to indicate it. "Tell me, Doctor, do you know if there have been any survivors? Not people who have survived being attacked by victims, people who have been infected and recovered successfully?"

...Oh. He should have expected she would ask something along those lines. "Two that I know of," he admitted reluctantly, trying to hold back the memory of holding Demyx's own lightsaber to his throat, a heartbeat away from killing his own companion. "I'm one of them. My friend is the other."

"Ah. This is excellent news," Hame said with a slightly wider smile, taking his arm to cross the rift more to be polite than because she needed the support. "You remember the Flesh, Doctor. You must remember the Flesh. But of our current Order, only I remember them as they were. Only I ever worked with them, or remember much of what we learned from them. From our greatest sin, Doctor, may come this city's salvation - as long as we have even one survivor of this virus, I believe I can create a cure."

* * *

Oh, good, the Doctor and the old cat lady were safely in the laboratory. That had to mean Demyx could close that last portal and then find somewhere to curl up and sleep already. Shattered, fuck, he was feeling next best to dead, and he damn well thought he'd earned a little -

(Don't worry; I can take over as translator,) he saw the Doctor saying to Madiv; her spotty coat was easy to pick out of any crowd. (If the toxicology reports are ready yet, we may need those.) Madiv shrugged and trotted over to one of the innumerable machines whose function Demyx couldn't even guess at, as the Doctor and the old cat lady came over to him. Apparently, he wasn't going to be allowed to sleep quite yet. Balls. **Demyx, this is Matron Hame,** the Doctor signed as soon as he knew Demyx was looking his way. **She's the head of the Sisters of Plenitude. She came all the way from New New York because she believes she can make a cure for the virus.**

**Well, good for her,** Demyx signed back lazily, aware that the other cat nuns in the laboratory were treating Hame with a great deal of deference but just too tired to be anything but casual. **What's this have to do with me? I've already had it, and I'm not the brains of this outfit. I don't know enough about anything to help.**

**...She needs your blood.**

"...Piss," Demyx said aloud, because he didn't know a specific sign for that word and "urine" wouldn't have the same effect. **Any reason she needs my blood in particular, or will pink look particularly cute in a bottle on the shelf over the fireplace?**

That earned him one of the Doctor's "Demyx, you're being stupid, not funny" looks. **She needs your blood because you've already had the virus and survived. That's what she intends to use to make the cure. My veins are going to be on tap too.** (He...gets a little funny around blood,) the Doctor added to Hame, as if he'd completely forgotten how good Demyx was at reading lips.

Well, no matter how much or how little Demyx liked getting his blood drawn (and _infinite_ thanks to the Doctor for making sure to mention his squeamishness out loud), he couldn't argue with something that might get rid of this killer virus. There had been some cruel calculus involved with deciding who could come down to the lab and who couldn't, mostly performed by Sister Jerrit - those deemed most at risk of being infected were left behind. And then he remembered the bodies in the hallway - had any of them known their killers, or had they just been in the way? Had they been infected themselves, or had they been innocent victims in every sense? The woman who'd infected him hadn't known him from the man in the moon or vice versa, and he could have killed...well, a lot of people, given half a chance. More than just Yin and the Doctor and the babies. **...Well, if you need it, tell her I'm in,** he signed. **But then can I please sleep?**

**Yes, you can sleep.** As the Doctor turned aside to go talk to someone else, Demyx sighed with relief and let his eyes sag closed, putting some vague effort into staying awake until they actually drew his blood, but not much. Hell, they could wake him up when they needed him, and he didn't really need to be awake when they didn't. He was just running low on fucks right then. Almost as he'd expected, all that happened was that the Doctor gave him a shake some unknown time later and said (Your turn), and Demyx pulled himself to his feet (with a little help), made his way over to where Yin was waiting by the phlebotomy chair (had that been there earlier?), obediently rolled up a sleeve, and just watched the process, so numb from exhaustion he didn't even really feel any pain, and that cotton-candy-pink stuff didn't turn his stomach like standard-issue red blood (or maybe he just didn't have a fuck left for that either). All he really gave a fuck about was that once Yin had extracted a sufficient amount of cotton-candy blood from his hide, he was allowed to return to his corner and curl up. Someone even handed him a blanket and pillow - a thin blanket and a flat pillow, but he didn't care; the gesture was nice enough, and he was tired enough, not to waste time wanting more.

The next time he was really aware of anything, he was still on the floor, stiff but better rested, and the Doctor was sitting a few feet away, deep in intense thought about something. Demyx was tempted to say something to him, but figured it wasn't worth interrupting whatever thoughts he had going on; instead, he shifted and sat up and took a look around the room and saw that no few of the evacuated patients were doing the same thing, with only a handful of staff still awake and moving around, including Sister Jerrit, whose temper wasn't likely to be improved by lack of sleep. It was slightly interesting to watch them at their work, and wonder what exactly they were doing, but not very, and with the Doctor so deep in his own thoughts and Madiv presumably asleep, there wasn't anyone for him to actually talk to. All there really was for him to do was rearrange himself into a more comfortable position and watch the activity. He'd almost fallen asleep again when a hand suddenly waved in front of his face, startling him enough to almost make him fall over. **Sorry,** the hand signed, while Demyx was still trying to get his thoughts back together. **I only just noticed you were awake**.

"I'm not sure I'm awake yet," Demyx said, because it was hard to sign and rub sleep out of your eyes at the same time. "I thought you were busy thinking."

**I had been, but I wasn't getting very far with it,** the Doctor signed, trying to smile despite the fact that he looked as worn as Demyx had felt before he went to sleep. **How are you feeling?**

**Rested...stiff...hungry.** Demyx really couldn't put it more concisely than that if he wanted to. **No one brought any food, did they?**

**Not yet**, the Doctor signed, looking over at him with veiled concern. Demyx was half-tempted to tell him not to worry, he wasn't made of glass, but he was uncomfortably aware that he was more prone to seizures when he hadn't eaten in a long time, and he doubted he'd had a bite in close to 48 hours now - certainly over 40. He'd had a seizure more recently than that. Having another one so soon would definitely not do good things to his brain. **Look, go back to the TARDIS and get something to eat. You can't starve. They'll forgive you an hour's absence.**

**I don't want to leave,** Demyx signed, well aware that he was being stupid but still reluctant to take himself away when his skills could mean someone's life at a moment's notice, especially since there would be no way to contact him until he came back on his own.

**...Look, I'm the Doctor. You're the companion. The Doctor tells the companion what to do, and the companion does what the Doctor tells them.**

**...Is that really how it works?**

**Go back to the TARDIS and eat something before you seize. I'm not trying to bully you. I'm trying to keep you healthy.**

**I'm glad you are, but I can't leave. I won't starve to death in six hours, let alone one. Five full days would be my record, actually.** The Doctor just gave him a disbelieving, how-stupid-are-you sort of look for that, but gave up arguing and went back to thinking, with an even more intense, anxious look than before. That expression by itself almost made Demyx crack - with everything else that was going on right now, was his refusal to eat right now that big an added concern? Did the Doctor know or suspect something he didn't? That was probably a hole with no bottom, but what in this particular situation did he know or suspect that Demyx didn't? Was it worth the effort to ask him, or would he just get brushed off for trying? Should he just...go eat something already? After all, the Doctor did have a point, and he was achingly hungry...

He glanced back over at the Doctor, and saw that the Doctor was smiling now. Not a normal happy sort of smile, but a big, crazy, going-to-save-the-universe-with-a-paperclip-and-a-bent-fork sort of smile. No, he was _definitely_ not going to ask.

(I think I have it,) the Doctor said, before standing up, moving to the center of the room, and letting out what was no doubt a piercing whistle if only Demyx could hear it. (All right, everyone, here's what needs to happen to save this city! First of all, you, the spotty one - Novice Madiv - and the ginger lady right there, whatever your name is. You know the way to the kitchen from here, don't you? Grab a couple bags, run down there, and grab everything you can find that doesn't need actual cooking. You've got about one hour to do it safely. You, what's your name? Sister Vela? Thank you. Does this city have big water vaporizers to maintain the ambient humidity, like they do in New New York? Excellent. Do you know where the vapor tanks are? The Undercity; all right. What's your name? Sister Treva - you're a neurosurgeon, aren't you? Do you have one of those headsets like you use for microneurosurgery? The ones that give you a live heads-up display of the patient's vital signs and brain activity and a magnified view of - oh, brilliant. Can I have it?...Please? We really are going to need it. Oh, thank you. All right, cranky brown tabby...what is your name, anyway? Sister Jerrit. That microphone you use for relaying stat results and critical values to - yes, I'm afraid I'll need that too. Not the earpieces. Just the microphone bit. All right, I still have Sister Savin's old tablet, and...can someone tell me what the password is to access the security monitors? I'm going to see if we can get them back, and then try to get at the city-wide monitors...actually, is there a computer terminal I could be doing this from? A tablet might not be enough...Demyx!) Demyx had been watching the Doctor's face with fascination, trying to keep up with everything he was saying, and jerked in surprise when the Doctor suddenly pointed straight at him. (Give me the sonic back, and then get some more rest. You're going to need it!)

* * *

Whatever was in these foil pouches was no doubt healthy, nutritious, and equivalent to a full meal of solid food. For now, the Doctor would be content to assume that, and not investigate too closely, or wonder why they couldn't taste like any sort of real food, as opposed to salty, fatty, half-set gelatin. It was what there was, and there was no point in wishing for anything better; as hungry as he was, a slice of moldy bread would have been welcome (depending, of course, on what type of mold the bread in question happened to be growing). Everyone else who could get one was sucking theirs down like it was the first meal they'd had all day and probably their last one for at least as long, and in all cases, his included, it probably was. That really didn't make up for how disgusting it tasted - keeping it down was going to be harder than getting it down.

Was there any hope of getting a drink of water to rinse the taste out? Maybe if he asked Demyx, but Demyx was busy sucking every last bit of...goo out of his own foil pouch. Well, he could ask later if he absolutely could not stand the taste in his mouth anymore; for now, he could get back to work on that cobbled-together headset he'd made. Sister Jerrit's microphone had been attached to Sister Treva's headset, and the headphones that had come attached to the microphone were now on their own, as they needed to be - now, how could he keep them electronically connected all the way across the city and into the Undercity? The wireless transceivers in the erstwhile headset were totally inadequate, but his odds of finding more donated bits to cobble into them were...well, how powerful was the transceiver in Sister Savin's tablet? "I don't suppose anyone knows exactly how far away these tablets can send and receive?" he asked whoever might be around to hear.

"...Well, the same sort of tablets go out with the ambulance crews so they can keep us updated and vice versa," said Sister Vela, leaning over to see exactly what he was doing. "The ambulances go all over the city. Overcity and Undercity. So they can reach at least that far."

"...That's brilliant. That's exactly what I need." Without a second thought, the Doctor flipped the tablet over and started cracking open its casing, while Sister Vela stared at him like she thought he'd completely flipped his lid. Well, he had and he was well aware of it, but not this recently. And he had to get the transceiver out without damaging it and swap it for the weak transceiver in Treva's headset. He ought to thank whoever designed these tablets, really - it was easier than repairing a short-circuiting mercury fluid link. All right, get the parts back together, seal up all the casings, yes, there was a solid signal, this should work... "Demyx!" he called, and slapped himself in the face as he recalled how little good that would do. However, the action seemed to get his attention, if the way he suddenly looked over at him was any clue. His attention was all he really needed. **Come here,** he signed, once he knew he had it. **I need you to test this headset. Put it on and go to some other part of the room where I can't hear you or see your face, and then just...talk into it.**

Demyx looked mostly confused by that request, but obediently took the headset and wandered off into some other corner of the room, while the Doctor put the headphones on and turned to the keyboard of the computer terminal he'd been working at. Soon enough, he could hear Demyx's voice coming through the headphones, as if he was standing right next to him. "Testing, testing, 123...testing, testing, 123...Can you hear me now? Good. So, Doc, what did that stuff taste like to you? In my opinion, it was a lot like gelatinized vomit...that's what it might have been, for all I know."

Oh, boy. Keeping it down was suddenly enough of a job to take the Doctor's full attention for a few moments. _Please don't talk about that_, he typed into the keyboard one-handed, with the other still clamped over his mouth. _Not unless you want to see it again. Are you seeing anything on the lenses?_

"Yeah...there are words popping up. Like a heads-up display. Are you typing them into something somewhere?"

_Yes. The headset is officially working. You can keep it for now. You're going to need it. _

"Need it for what?"

_Well, it's going to involve an awful lot of running._

"I was afraid of that. It always seems to."

_It does come as part of the deal. Here, let me try something else._ A few finger-swipes brought up the overhead map of the Overcity he'd found earlier; a few more replaced it with the map of the Undercity, and a few more brought the Overcity back. _Are you seeing the map?_ he typed for Demyx's benefit.

"...Yes. I assume this has something to do with where I'm supposed to be running?"

_Yes. Now give the headset back for a minute; I want to see if I can work out some sort of positioning system so I can track you. And a drink of water. I don't want this taste in my mouth anymore._

"You have something against the taste of gelatinized vomit?"

_Yes. I actually just tasted it again. Now stop talking about it before we have to see it again._ He could hear Demyx laughing into the microphone for a few seconds, before the sound suddenly died and was replaced by random rustles. A few seconds later, he appeared right next to him with the headset in one hand and a ball of water in the other. The Doctor was completely not sure what to do with the ball of water, but it held together when Demyx gave it to him, and sucking on it got enough water in his mouth to make the nasty taste go away and stop distracting him so he could try to work this out. GPS wouldn't work, or, well, it would if he could get his hands on one to salvage, but the odds were awfully low. Maybe some sort of triangulation, between the headset, the computer, and...something else? What would be a good third point to use? City map might help...city senate building might work. This would take a bit of computer work, but as long as there was some sort of wireless transceiver that was connected to some sort of computer system that he could somehow access from this computer...oh, this was so much fun. No computer in the _world_ was safe from him. And as long as the transceiver in the headset was strong enough to communicate from and with every point in the city...oh, yes. Easy enough. Each computer transceiver judged the angle between itself, the headset, and the other fixed transceiver, a simple program drew a triangle and pinpointed the headset's location, and then it was displayed on the map. Sometimes he was just clever enough to amaze himself. "Demyx! Someone get Demyx's attention, please!" he called to anyone who might listen, then put the headset on himself to make sure everything was displaying _really_ correctly and the location dot showed up on that map too and tapping the side once made it go away and tapping it again brought it back like it was supposed to. Yes, it worked, and it was brilliant. Brilliant enough to save a city with, once the headset was on the right head...

Oh, he could just jump up and down and dance like an idiot right now. The vaccine was done. He wasn't sure Hame even knew it yet, but he could tell that as of that moment, there existed a cure to the virus that was holding them all hostage. All that really needed to happen now was the delivery...and by the time Demyx actually made it to the Doctor's chair, the smile was completely gone from his face, and he had one hand pressed to his left heart, trying to breathe deeply and act calm and not panic. He knew his plan _could_ work, if given the chance, or why did he just spend all that time messing with that headset and taking the transceiver out of Sister Savin's tablet and everything, but _could_ by itself wasn't good enough. The important part was whether or not it _would_ work, and that he just did not know. Out of every hundred possible futures he could see from here, ninety-five of them led directly to Demyx being killed, or the hospital being overrun, or some other disaster that would totally ruin his plan, but none of them were pointing him to a better plan. They had no choice now but to run with what he had. "You can have this back," he said in a cracking voice, handing the headset back to Demyx. "Take care of it. Take care of it like your life depends on it." Demyx had enough common sense that he really didn't feel the need to add the last few words - _it does_.


End file.
